Artist: Valentina Triet
Exhibition title: Mulde
Venue: Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany
Date: December 17, 2022 – February 12, 2023
Photography: All images copyrighted by the artist and Mareike Tocha/Neuer Essener Kunstverein
Valentina Triet’s exhibition Mulde consists of a series of newly created images whose subject is the deconstruction of recognition. In the process, photographs of catwalk models are photographed, edited and scanned several times in an idiosyncratic procedure until the legibility of the original photographic signal reaches the tipping point towards the abstract, turning three-dimensional perception into the two-dimensional. Through multiple processing and repeated photographing with different techniques, the interchangeable postures of the mannequins, which are supposed to disappear behind the clothes, become more individual, slip out of secondary importance. And this although at the same time they become formally more shadowy, more abstract. Research and reference images, which Triet had initially placed on her studio wall without any specific intentions, served as models for the exhibited series until the perception and classification of these images somehow changed for her. Subject of the work is thus the composting of images, the bringing about of change within pictorial material through an insistent curiosity. As a result, the images become projection surfaces, not unlike models in editorials. Moreover, the processed images have an openness all of their own; the edges of the individual images offer the possibility of connection for other works from the series, leaving open which (or if any) system of order lies behind them. The sheer number of images presented may be a reference to the theoretical incompleteness of such an explorative image reading practice as Triet has carried out with this series.
Valentina Triet (*1991) lives and works in Vienna. She studied at the Zurich University of the Arts and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Mulde is her first institutional solo exhibition.
