Claiming the highest rank

At the invitation of the gallerist Isabella Brancolini, the artist Leta Peer, originally from the Swiss Engadine, today based in Basel and New York, spent several months in Tuscany at the beginning of 2002. The results of this stay will be shown for the first time from 30 October 2002 to 22 December 2002 at the Galleria Isabella Brancolini arte contemporena in Florence: The artist does not only show paintings in oil on cotton duck, wood and copper, but also digitally manipulated photographs.

For a number of years, Leta Peer has been interested in the reception and representation of landscape. One reason for this interest stems from a fact that already aroused the interest of realist and impressionist painters towards landscape painting in the 19th century: It was assigned a very low position in the traditional hierarchy of genres, because landscape painting was thought to depict merely what was given, rather than supplying moral examples like history painting. But it was precisely because of this supposed flaw that especially in the depiction of landscape painting was and is able to blossom as such. This also applies to Leta Peer's work: Because of the sometimes very small formats, every brush stroke is simultaneously the representation of stone, cloud, snow as well as pure paint.

Yet Leta Peer goes beyond this formalist aspect in her work: She is also always interested in the context not only of the landscape, but also of art. As in the earlier mountain series, in the paintings and photos created during her stay in Tuscany, her investigations are devoted to a landscape, the perception of which is always already distorted by cultural influences and expectations.

By digitally smuggling her paintings of Tuscan and Swiss landscapes into the center of late medieval and baroque high altars, she makes the seemingly trivial landscape assume a position of being highly revered, claiming the highest rank, and thus questioning our attitude toward religion and landscape to an equal extent.

Heinz Stahlhut, art historian, Basel