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Press release:
Exhibition: Leta Peer Devoted to a Landscape
Opening: Friday, March 12th 2004, 19.00 – 22.00
Constancy: March 12th – April 30th
Leta Peer was born 1964 in Switzerland and studied Painting at the Schule für Gestaltung at Basel, Switzerland by Franz Fedier. She received numbers of prices and awards and showed her works at exhibitions in Europe, USA and Canada.
Leta Peer’s new works are on the one hand large-size oil paintings, which deal with the topic “mountain”, on the other hand they are digitally arranged photos, which seem to stylise the mountain landscape into a sacral image.
She further develops therefore the topic of her earlier, postcard-sized mountain landscapes, which she drew on wood and furnished with a golden frame. Peer’s works remind of the paintings of the romanticism, of their assumed harmonization of nature with humans. Yet they confront us at the same time with exploitation and aestheticism of nature. Peer shows a sharpened view on width and distance with her new works and animates to reflect on terms like nature and homeland.
Her photographical works dare an extraordinary, dense communication between painting and photography, on which Peer reverts to the high altar and the painting in a gilt frame as a sacral work, but also puts it in a different context: with the exalted, elevated positioning of landscape the devoted place becomes suspect and is subtle transformed. The artist shows therefore the insurmountable distance to nature but also expresses the wish to be closely bonded with her, with the roots of humans. This conflict does not show up loudly or brutally within Peer’s work, it’s incorporated into the play of different medias she uses. The grade between backing and braking with traditions of romantic painting is very narrow and not definite; exactly this narrow grade accounts for the charm of her art.
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