Leta Peer. Mirrors
DELTA. Gallery and Art Space
23 February to 27 April,
Fridays from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm (except holidays)
or by appointment (phone: 061/261 62 69 for appointments).

At DELTA, from 23 February bis 27 April, Leta Peer shows her most recent paintings and photos. The artist works at the intersection between painting, photography and installation. These more recent works represent a further development of previous ensembles.

In the GIFTs (Gemalt-Installiert-FotografierT – “painted-installed-photographed” ) from the late 1990s, the artist installed her own paintings temporarily in unusual locations, such as the Grand Central Station in New York, and took photos of them there. With this guerilla action she not only continued her work on the theme of ornament and decoration, but also expanded it into an investigation into the availability of public space.

In the action Borrowed Places 2001, for which Leta Peer loaned small format paintings for a certain period to friends and acquaintances and photographed them on site, the artwork became a means of exploring the private sphere. The way the “owners” dealt with the painting, which was captured in the photographs, revealed individual characteristics of each person; the photo of the interior became a portrait of the person absent from the picture.

Whereas in earlier works Leta Peer installed and photographed her own paintings in unusual places, in more recent cycles, such as “Mirrors”, this installation is created digitally. The conjunction of views of the abandoned spaces of a former bakery about to be demolished and depictions of Alpine landscapes results in confrontations that are both enchanting and disturbing: in the photographs the traces of use on the walls and doors – in immediate proximity to Leta Peer’s paintings after photographs by her late brother – take on a quasi painterly character and speak at the same time of transience and memory as two of the artist’s central themes.

The “Mirrors”, the exhibition of which has been made possible thanks to the Gallery Fabian and Claude Walter, Zürich, are presented in the exhibition with the most recent paintings by Leta Peer.