Leta Peer - Borrowed Places

Sheltered, borrowed, "lent in" and "stolen"

"Borrowed Places"- the book on an art project by the Basel-based artist Leta Peer

Between vases, the picture. Behind cactuses, the picture. Above the bed, in the elevator, in the mirror, in the cupboard - the picture. Cloud-covered mountain peaks on small wooden panels that the artist Leta Peer calls "mountain miniatures", here a lofty alpenglow, there low-lying gray mist, in themselves as little spectacular as they are highly diverse. Yet they are staged in places where the small formats sometimes dominate, are sometimes completely insignificant.

Art has long since absorbed its contexts, and the artist Leta Peer, born 1965 in Winterthur, based in Basel since about 15 years, also swings back and forth between media and critique of (exhibition) praxis. Despite the sublime allusions, Peer is anything but a pupil from Friedrich's romanticism or Hodler's realism kitchen.

We are not talking about pictures in a gallery, but rather leafing through the pages of the art book "Borrowed Places", which was published by Christoph Merian Verlag in conjunction with a Peer exhibition at the Galerie Schneider in Ettlingen/Germany. And it is not the small-format oil paintings per se that interest the artist, but rather their "use" and the places where the tiny idylls have been hung, placed, put down.

The project "Borrowed Places" shows photographs of private interiors, into which the panels of the Alps have "lent" themselves, away from the shelter of the studio: while she was staying in New York, Peer lent her little paintings to friends and acquaintances - many of them also from the field of art - later using the camera to capture where and how they placed her paintings at home.

A recommendable introduction by Heinz Stahlhut traces Peer's artistic development, the way she plays with nearness and distance, her early occupation with power and gender, with the decorative and the trivial, all the way to her spatial, installative works, including most recently "Ornament and Abstraction" at the Berowergut Restaurant at the Beyeler Foundation.

In "Borrowed Places", the status of the picture - actually a picture in a picture - is shifted spatially to the periphery and discursively into the center. It is not only translated into a new medium, but depending on its placement, it is sometimes presented laid out like an altar, sometimes degraded to a decoration; it pointedly graces the wall of a noble lodge or drowns in the chaos of books and accessories. Whoever owns art, also has the power over its presentation, and whoever gives art away, also gives away the control over it.

Thus "Borrowed Places" are not only borrowed art places, but also - in the euphemistic sense of the word - "stolen". The artist steals them back, not only by staging the photographs for her part, but also by penetrating into the private sphere of those who take the pictures, people with an appreciation for art, who would otherwise be critically inspecting the studio.

It is left up to the reader and the observer to reconstruct the temporary user on the basis of the sparse information of the interior and the short, sometimes poetic, sometimes very personal texts that are placed beside the photos in the book. The conceptual employment of the painting thus eludes a portrayal, which is certainly to be taken as a criticism of the bourgeois way of dealing with art - particularly because of the way the "loan-takers" have often consciously and unconventionally chosen and arranged the locations for the paintings.

Alexander Marzahn

Leta Peer: "Borrowed Places", Christoph Merian Verlag, 2001, 44 color pictures, Fr. 42.-