Heidi Specker
D’Elsi
September 14 – November 3, 2007

We are proud to present the latest work of Heidi Specker – D’Elsi – in an exhibition to be shown from September 14, 2007, at the fiedler contemporary gallery.
D’Elsi took Specker to Switzerland – to Davos and then to the Grisons, the Engadine and Ticino.

This is the first exhibition to show photographic portraits by the artist. Set within, rather than added to image fragments, landscapes, and the depth of detail so typical of Specker, these portraits capture and captivate in their subtlety. Specker’s penchant for the organic, its textures and structures on trees, branches, and greenery is a running motif in D’Elsi. While this work might seem to continue from the Im Garten series of 2003, the graphical detail retreats from the central theme in D’Elsi, now providing the context and leaving the portrait to take the fore.

Specker’s landscapes have gained a protagonist, Elsi, a central figure taking position between the eyes of the artist and the scene, then guiding the eyes to the visible to meld with sounds and voices. It seems that you can also smell and listen to the images tell a story – without forcing sentimentality or nostalgia. Haute Couture behind a display window radiates timelessness, its value lying in the absence of time, with all of time in one stretch. Simultaneousness comes before the eyes of Elsi and the viewer in a portrait where age and time seem vague and unimportant. The work evokes the question of simultaneousness – if merely by suggestion. Even so, a chronology does run through Specker’s latest work, the chronology of tales told; a certain path that allows the eye to rove. This reflexive desire to neutralise those scents – is that the desire of the viewer, or the figure in the work? Specker’s work sways between the viewer and the main figure, ever promising relief and consolation. Disharmony, interwoven cloth, landscape and material vie with protection, sobriety and discretion through panes of glass, a curtain, a water surface, an azure blue … a face in bronze.

You will not see any picture in D’Elsi with an ambivalent or mysterious motif for the sake of abstraction itself, but very much the temptation towards abstraction in the visible – despite Specker’s own consistent clarity of vision.

Bettina Andrae

Like the previous works, there will be a publication accompanying the D’Elsi series – D’Elsi, Steidl Göttingen, 2008.
Heidi Specker is a professor of photography and media at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts.
D’Elsi will be part of Thomas Weski’s world-touring group exhibition Darstellung I Vorstellung hosted by the ifa.
A printed edition, D’Elsi-Tessin, consisting of four pigment prints (A4 folder) will be available.