Latifa Echakhch at Dvir Gallery

Artist: Latifa Echakhch

Exhibition title: Nude

Venue: Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

Date: May 13 – June 24, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Dvir Gallery

Born in Morocco and raised in France, Latifa Echakhch mines cultural materials as subject matters for her work. By deconstructing and re-presenting everyday objects, Echakhch creates sharp witted installations that challenge cultural assumptions.

In her process-based works, audiences are confronted with the traces of an action and with a part of the artist’s personal life.

For her fourth solo exhibition NUDE at Dvir Gallery, Latifa Echakhch has developed a new body of work reflecting and dialoguing with the landscape of Tel Aviv.

In her most recent paintings, developed for the exhibition on site, Latifa reworked in a material and poetic way her impressions and sentiments of long walks through Tel Aviv. Presenting itself as a portrait of the city, the new works evoke elements of decomposition, renewal, vanishing, reconstruction that are urbanistic but also human. This beautiful new series, entitled NUDE, is the peak of an ongoing process in Latifa’s work, unfolding a personal connection to her own life and creating a space of intimacy between the viewer and the piece just as between Echakhch and her artwork.

Reflecting on the traits and stories of life, our culture, and its imprints on our way of being, the works Nova and Untitled (cups) evoke an ambivalence of meaning between their original functions and their subsequent delicacy in a decomposed state. Latifa puts forward a contrast in materiality and functionality, wherein the object she uses becomes the holder of its own fragility, unveiling the limits of human strength and durability.

Appropriating the day-to-day objects and elements familiar to us, every piece creates a transversal journey between the artist’s personal history and the immediate impression of her surroundings. As beautifully shown in Returns of the day, a mortar and pestle is filled with stones (once sand), provoking a tension that questions time itself.

Latifa Echakhch (born 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco) lives in Fully, Switzerland. Solo exhibitions have been held at venues including Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria (2015); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2015); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); MAC, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon (2013); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2012); Kunsthaus, Zurich (2012); MACBA, Barcelona (2010); Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2009); and Tate Modern, London (2008). Her work has been part of numerous group exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2016); Museo Riso, Palermo (2015); Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China (2014); Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2013); Kunsthalle Basel (2010), Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow (2010); Jerusalem Foundation (2008); and National Gallery of Art, Tirana (2005). She has participated in the Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012); 54th Venice Biennale (2011); the 10th Biennale de Lyon (2009) and the Manifesta 7 in Bolzano, Italy (2008) and Art Focus, Jerusalem (2008). She won the 2015 Zurich Art Prize and the 2013 Marcel Duchamp Prize.