Correspondence. On show new works. The German artist conflates photography and cinema to produce psychologically charged vignettes and re-photographed film stills merged with staged shots taken in and around her home and studio.
Ambach & Rice is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by German artist Martina Sauter,
Correspondence. Sauter continues to conflate photography and cinema to produce psychologically
charged vignettes that extend time and space.
Fiction is warped, concealed and extended in Sauter’s photographic constructions. Memory serves as an
entry point to elicit the faint echo of familiarity. Re-photographed film stills, captured on her television
screen, merge with photographs shot in and around Sauter’s home and studio. Film stills faintly drift from
their source once merged with staged photographs of domestic objects and interiors. These scenes exude
suspense, casting concealment as a platform for suggestion.
When selecting film stills Sauter eschews iconic scenes in favor of anonymous segues, passages both
temporal and architectural. These stages are laden with suspense; allowing absence to trigger imagined
implications, leaving outcomes to be resolved by the viewer. When actors are present they are typically
relegated to the background, backs turned to the camera to position the viewer as witness or voyeur.
Three novels inspired and informed the exhibit, The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, James Ellroy’s Black
Dhalia, and The Trial by Franz Kafka, all of which were later adapted for film. The evolution from written
word to projected image is alluded to in a number of the Black Dhalia works, which impart fragmented
subtitles. As a group this suite of images suggest a sort of concrete poetry, a fissure between image and
text that grants further free association. Perhaps Sauter’s compositions are more akin to the sensation of
reading fiction than witnessing it upon a screen. Like reading her photographs are activated by the
participant’s imagination, enabling the static to become animated, the resolution just pages away.
Martina Sauter was born in Constance, Germany in 1974. From 2000 through 2006 she attended
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where she studied under Thomas Ruff and graduated as one of his master
students. Recent exhibits include Shapely Shadows and a New Apartment, AMBACH & RICE, Seattle,
WA, Martina Sauter, Marion Scharmann, Cologne, DE Neues Rheinland. Die postironische Generation,
Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, DE, and Manuel Graf / Martina Sauter, Kunststiftung Baden
Württemberg, Stuttgart, DE. Her work has bee exhibited at institutions that include The Aperture
Foundation, New York, Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam and Ludwig Forum in Aachen. Sauter
received both the Thieme Art Award and the Young Artists on the Road Award in 2006. She currently
resides in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Opening Friday 5.25.12 6 - 8pm
Ambach & Rice
Wilshire Blvd, 6148, LA
Tues – Sat 11am – 6pm
Admission free