Art Metropole

#05823

Liz Deschenes, Secession

Artist

Liz Deschenes

Date

2012

Publisher

Secession

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

978-3-902592-63-7

Size

16.5 × 22.2 × 1.5 cm

Length

100 

Liz Deschenes’ first monograph, presented in conjunction with her exhibition at Secession, December 7, 2012 – February 10, 2013, features a range of works spanning much of the artist’s career. This one hundred page, richly illustrated publication includes an interview between Bettina Spörr and Liz Deschenes, and texts by Johanna Burton and Ruth Horak.

Deschenes’s photographic oeuvre deals with the conditions of photography and its components, with perception and the correlation to other artistic media, and with the architecture within which her works are shown. These works allow a self-referential look at the medium, liberated of its functions, taking its own conditions as its theme. For some years now, Deschenes has been working almost exclusively with photograms—pictures created without a camera which, traditionally, served to capture silhouettes by placing objects on photosensitive paper exposing it to light. Deschenes does without these external references: the works made by exposing photographic paper for several hours, out of doors, mostly at night, before fixing and treating them with toners. Deschenes’s photograms change, they oxidize, their colors shift, they are in a constant state of flux. This relates her current work to earlier explorations of color and monochromy, which are also presented in the book.