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2/3/2006

Alexandra Leykauf

Barbara Wien gallery, Berlin

Over the past few years Alexandra Leykauf worked with the various possibilities of photographic manipulation and processing. She often uses found photographs as the starting point of her work, separating them from their original context and thus referring to the ambiguous 'truth' in photography. By representing the represented she reveals the multiple possibilities of perceptions within one image. Or she photographs images in books, including the fold at the center of the book as a medium of image alteration and illusion.

Collage offers another media in which she can alter image and image association. Leykauf's poster book shows her resourcefulness in deconstructing images and transferring them in a new but nevertheless equally constructed context. This play on the plurality of visible planes is continued in her new works, which we will be showing in our exhibition. They are crayon drawings or watercolours. First she covers the paper with watercolour or crayon wax and then she layers the whole surface with oil paint. After that she scrapes out the oil paint, revealing the image below. The manner of her painting is a kind of 'negative painting'. Thereby she reverses the process of image developement.
It is not the application of paint coats which lead to a picture, it is the partial destruction of the already present layers which allow the image to become visible. Essentially the image was there, it just needed to be 'scratched out'. Leykauf's close contact to photography becomes explicit here - as negative and slide image can also only become exposed through light.

In various ways the content of her images pick up the topic of illusion and elusiveness. The theater motif f.e. refers to a play between reality and backdrop, inside and outside, viewer and performer and at the same time she reverses this play by making the auditorium to a backdrop for a film.
Furthermore Leykauf uses the gallery space to realise a play between stage versus reality and inside versus outside. The windows are covered by a construction which appears from the outside to the passerby as a sort of backdrop, thus suggesting a stage on the inside. By entering the gallery one automatically becomes a participant and yet remains a viewer.
Leykauf will show a slide work in the passageway of the gallery.

Barbara Wien gallery and bookshop for art books
Linienstrasse 158, court
D-10115 Berlin-Mitte
Tuesday-Friday 2-7 p.m., Saturday 12-6 p.m.

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