Anouk Tschanz

Anouk Tschanz explores the process of seeing and perceiving the ordinary through the camera lens. The visual impulses for the artist's work come from extended walks through parks, forests and botanical gardens, where she selects her subjects in an affective manner. For Edition VFO, the artist has conceived a new series of snowdrops, shot with a medium format camera and developed in small editions on baryta paper. Snowdrops have been popular ornamental plants for centuries and are among the first flowering plants of spring. There are about 20 species in the snowdrop genus and their distribution stretches from Europe to southwest Asia. The small snowdrop in the photographs is the only species of wild snowdrops found in Central Europe and at the same time the most often cultivated one in gardens and parks. Wild snowdrops are extremely rare plants that grow in their original form only in isolated places.

Tschanz captures the blossoms in the studio in daylight, creating sculptural-looking compositions that foreground surface structure and plant form. In its strictly formal aesthetic, the work is reminiscent of representatives of New Objectivity such as Karl Blossfeldt or Albert Renger-Patzsch and can be placed in a long tradition of nature and plant photography. However, the artist is not concerned with a scientific view of nature. Her approach can rather be understood as a poetic one, establishing a field of tension between representation and abstraction. In Tschanz's work seriality serves to create tension between the individual images, and the focus on the transience of the motifs is central. In doing so, the artist entices us to keep looking closer to explore the mysterious character of these natural objects and our relationship to them, without romanticizing them.

Anouk Tschanz's last exhibitions were at Coalmine, Winterthur (2021) and at Longtang, Zurich (2020). The artist has shown in group exhibitions at MCBA, Lausanne, the Museum of Photography, Berlin and Kunsthaus Langenthal among others. Her works are in the collection of the Fotostiftung Schweiz, the Burger Collection and the Art Collection of the Canton of Zurich. DK