Badische Neueste Nachrichten, December 3, 1996

At the Galerie Margit Haupt in Karlsruhe

Women in between Beds and Flower Beds

The Swiss artist Leta Peer and her multifaceted picture combinations

Artificial flowers from Switzerland have a special charm of their own. Whereas the Swiss rock-lady and video artist Pipilotti Rist is currently presenting her exhibition in Baden-Baden in the name of the rose, her compatriot Leta Peer reaches deep into the rich magnificence of flora. All the 32-year-old artist needs for this is a paintbrush, paint, and painting ground - and the radiant red, beautiful blue and yearning yellow proliferate in a rococo-like abundance, next to which the old masters' eroticized feast for the eyes - whether by Fragonard or Boucher - almost look pale. This is currently to be put to the test in the Karlsruhe gallery.
Everything wonderfully sensual? Yes. But Leta Peer also follows - in keeping with the times and undogmatically - the old aesthetic rule of conjoining the useful with the pleasurable and vice versa. Alongside the richly glowing flower beds, one therefore finds bed scenes and poses of sexual willingness, over which enlarged ads from newspapers and magazines have been additionally superimposed. In between, there are written notices, such as "women in the military will take off by themselves at the front."
The point of debate here is the image of woman between cliché and self-assurance, between boudoir and hair-drier, divine promises and male ambitions for power. Everything clear? No. Leta Peer leaves no doubt that her work involves women in a present that is emotionally charged by market economy, sometimes still living in an ambiguous relationship to the 19th century. This legacy reverberates in Leta Peer's works. However, the fact that they are composed of several heterogeneous images already characterizes the attitude of the artist, who pulls single moments out of the maelstrom of visual information and combines them in a new way - the insight that is to be gained from this, though, is left up to the viewer.
Michael Hübl

(Until Dezember 7th at the Galerie Margit Haupt, Karlsruhe, Lachenstrasse 7)