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BATIA SUTER
Shelter Series, 2012. D. R.
Since the mid-1990s Swiss artist Batia Suter has been collecting, compiling and
reproducing thousands of images. The second-hand books that she has hunted
out for the sake of their illustrations are sometimes displayed with no alterations
– open, aligned, or in staggered rows like brickwork – to form thick carpets or
long tables covered with images. But more generally the iconography is extracted
from the books and becomes the object of editorial redistribution on the walls.
Suter's organisational criteria for the many images she has amassed tend to
vary. Some are juxtaposed because of morphological, functional or iconographic
affinities. Others just seem to be grouped according to their print style. The grids
of textured façades, drain covers and checked shirts that Sol LeWitt presented
in his book PhotoGrids (1977) were forerunners of Batia Suter's conceptual
approach. The inventory of roofs presented in Roofs (2012) owes something to
the architectural typologies of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher,
with the difference, however, that Suter collects already existing images. She
has also forsaken the grid in favour of piling, and has broken typological
confines in order to encompass a far wider definition of roofing that includes, for
example, the megaliths of Stonehenge and Le Corbusier's Chapel at Ronchamp.
Since the Bechers, data bases and search engines like Google Image have
changed the situation radically: things have become less hierarchical and more
decompartmentalised.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1967 in Bülach (Switzerland), lives and works in Amsterdam (Netherlands).
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Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
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