Memory—and
by extension, value—is transcribed through photography. All aspects of daily
life is—from the fleeting to the profoundly memorable –is recorded with the aid
of digitalized pixels. Street life is captured with endless, often covert, surveillance
while wedding events are instantly arrested by smartphones and uploaded to
Facebook and Twitter. Contemporary media’s instantaneousness—creating a
condition in which an experience can be lived, recorded, reproduced and
disseminated in a matter of seconds—would appear to be antithetical to the
procedures and values revolving around the production of hand-made objects. Digital
photography in all its manifestations is produced with a microchip and stored
on a cloud while painting is still made with pre-modern materials and must be
physically retained and viewed i.r.l.—in real life.
Hauser & Wirth’s solo exhibition
of Caro Niederer’s paintings explores this apparently dichotomous relationship amongst
photography and painting’s disparate meanings. Niederer’s exhibition—her first
in New York City—presents a sizeable selection of large sized paintings and
smaller panel images that constitutes a mini-retrospective of this Swiss artist’s
practice in paint. The artist, born in 1963, presents in the front gallery a
grouping of small paintings made on canvas board dated to 1990 that establish Niederer’s
flat, mawkish approach to the medium. In the same gallery hangs a large new
painting, ‘Steinmenschen (Stone Figures)’
from 2012. Similar to ‘Zen Garden’ from
1990, ‘Steinmenschen’ depicts a
landscape modeled in flat, undifferentiated paint handling that boarder on the
amateurish. Niederer’s relationship to painting—a conceptual gambit of ‘will
she or wont she commit’—estranges the viewer while also pivoting towards the
emotional content of her work. The middle gallery presents similarly large
paintings as ‘Steinmenschen’
including two large landscape paintings Haldewig
bergab (Haldeliweg downhill) and Shafherde
(Flock of Sheep) that depict overtly banal subject matter painted in murky
yellows, crimsons and Prussians. Niederer’s color—the defining formal quality of her
work—is accentuated in the back gallery—whose walls have been painted a bright
pink fuchsia—in retellings of erotic scenes from the Kama Sutra. The upstairs gallery rounds out the show with several
additional large landscapes and interiors.
Niederer’s transformation of
photograph to hand-made object informs her entire practice. The artist has also
in the past turned snapshots into hand-made tapestries created by laborers in
workshops in China. Niederer also manages to pick up several stylistic
influences through her retelling of photographs. Niederer’s choice of subject
matter—gardens, interiors, beach scenes, landscapes—has its feet firmly planted
in the French pastoral tradition of Corot and Poussin while her color palate can
run from the exploded rainbow factory of Peter Doig in her Häldeliweg bergauf (Häldeliweg uphill), from 2011 to
the sienna monochrome monotony of Gerhard Richter in his least happy Germanic moods
in her Karen Blixen's Garden, from 2006.
Niederer’s
pre-existing source material, family snapshots, postcards, Indian erotic imagery,
is twirled through her chosen medium, in this case paint. Stylistically hybrid,
Niederer’s diverse reactions in paint to photography is simultaneously
emotionally direct and also withholding—which parallels her viewer’s own
reactions to photography’s emotional charisma. Photography—unlike painting—has an every-day
use value that creates an ongoing emotional dialogue with its viewer. A
participant in photography can be either aghast at the site of an unflattering tag
on Facebook or be deeply touched by a friend’s baby picture. Photography, not
the handmade painting, is the dominant mode of visual recording in contemporary
society. By creating hand-made objects in response to the dominant discourse,
photography, Niederer makes highly valuable art commodities, paintings, tapestries,
videos, that transform meaning from one arena, the candid and the personal, to
another, the aesthetic and the public. Niederer’s exhibition questions the aura
of painting, how it is only activated in a gallery space in juxtaposition to
the photograph which is active at all times in our waking and dormant life. For
Niederer, painting is aesthetic and hierarchical, while the photograph is
mercurial, transitional and most of all, personal.
 |
Steinmenschen (Stone Figures), 2012
Oil on canvas 260 x 175 cm / 102 3/8 x 68 7/8 in |
 |
Schafherde (Flock of Sheep), 2012
Oil on canvas 200 x 300 cm / 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in |
 |
Picknick (Picnic), 2012
Oil on canvas 210 x 150 cm / 82 5/8 x 59 in |
 |
Jodhpur-Schule, Indien, ca. 1830 (Jodhpur-School,
India, approx. 1830), 1993—2012
Oil on canvas board 24 x 18 cm / 9 1/2 x 7 1/8 in |
 |
Häldeliweg bergauf (Häldeliweg uphill), 2011
Oil on canvas 146 x 114 cm / 57 1/2 x 44 7/8 in |
 |
Häldeliweg bergab (Häldeliweg downhill), 2011
Oil on canvas 146 x 114 cm / 57 1/2 x 44 7/8 in |
 |
Karen Blixen's Garden, 2006
Oil on canvas 210 x 150 cm / 82 5/8 x 59 in |
 |
Zen Garden, 1990
Oil on canvas board 18 x 24 cm / 7 1/8 x 9 1/2 in |
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