Elfie Semotan

Campeche is pleased to announce Elfie Semotan: Color y Carne / Color and Flesh, the artist’s first presentation in Mexico.

Elfie Semotan (b. 1941 in Wels, Upper Austria; lives and works in Vienna and Burgenland, Austria) is a renowned photographer who has produced an expansive oeuvre encompassing landscapes, still lives, nudes, portraits, fashion photographs, and conceptual works over the past 50 years. Best known as the grand dame of Austrian photography and her extensive fashion photography career, Semotan is recognized for her ability to merge reality and fiction and dissolve the borders between art, fashion, and life itself. While her work spans numerous genres, it is her acute consideration oft he everyday, mundane aspects of reality that has become the defining characteristic of her work. Manipulating light, focus, and perspective, Semotan activates the interstices between candid action and staging to foreground individuality, authenticity, and mood in each of her images. She has stated that light is the most significant factor in her photography, arguing that “light plays a crucial role. It defines a form or dissolves it. Light produces a photo or it destroys it.”

Organized by independent curators Úrsula Dávila-Villa (Mexico City, Vienna and New York City) and Anna Stothart (New York City) Color y Carne features a selection of Semotan’s landscapes, portraits, and still lives spanning 1990 to 2020. The exhibition features works that embody Semotan’s emblematic approach to capturing texture in the form of light and flesh and compositional abstraction that includes framing and cropping techniques used to deconstruct the ordinary. Along with these principles, selections in the exhibition illustrate Semotan’s penchant for engaging art historical references in her photography–her Anatomy of a Print series inspired by an artistic anatomy book, the black-white images inspired by the American artist John Coplans featuring body parts of a late career model, and a portrait of fashion designer Helmut Lang that borrows compositional arrangements from Medieval paintings.

— Campeche

Curators talk “Radicality and permanence in artistic legacy: Cecilia Vicuña, Elfie Semotan and Lorraine O’Grady”

On the day of the opening, at 11am, on the top floor, there will be an in-depth conversation with independent curators, Úrsula Dávila-Villa and Anna Stothart, as they discuss strategies behind estate managing and legacy planning for artists, Lorraine O’Grady, Elfie Semotan, and Cecilia Vicuña. Over the past few years, Dávila-Villa and Stothart have gained recognition for working closely with artists, estates, and foundations, on strategic planning surrounding archives, inventory management, and studio logistics, as well as the collaborative planning and execution for major institutional exhibitions, including O’Grady’s career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum (2021); Vicuña’s participation in the Venice Biennale, The Hyundai Comission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and a career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (all 2022); and Semotan’s career retrospective at the Kunst Haus Wien (2021).

RSVP