Oeuvres Photographiques / Photographic Works

The book retraces the last ten years in the career of Mauren Brodbeck, an artist from Geneve who, with her work, overrides the borders between art genres, creating multilayered images able to call the limits between real and virtual into question. Photography, collage, graphics are only a few of the instruments she uses to undermine our perceptive frames of mind. The use of color applied to elements of the urban landscape as buildings, car parks, warehouses, hides them while, at the same time, makes them monumental. Equally monumental are the colored objects, similar to oversized sculptures, the artist includes within her city views. The dialogue between presence and absence can be found in the processing of the human figure, where the color transforms the bodies into silhouettes, in order to underline the passage from one state of the form to another. ­Mauren Brodbeck was born in Geneva in 1974. She was first trained in «Visual Arts» (painting and drawing). She then worked and studied in the fields of cinematography as film director and producer of shorts films, documentaries and ads for which she won three prizes and participated to several festivals. Mauren graduated in photography and design from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA and in cinematographic production from the Vancouver Film School. She currently works as a photographer and is represented by several galleries in Switzerland, France and Germany. Her initial training in painting and drawing enables Mauren to give an eclectic dimension to her work, the resulting projects have a pictorial and sculptural vision and composition. ­She wrote: żMy approach is based on appropriation, reconstruction and the simplification of reality. I work in parallel with photography and video by using different techniques such as collage, animation, superposition, erasing, color application and time stretch. It is by lingering my glance on an element that can seem trivial at first, that I create and reconstitute an image or a video. The ordinary is disconcerting, all my works initiate from that angle. In my various series of work, video or photographic, I always investigate the way we perceive and create our reality and use memory to reconstruct it. They are essays on identity through the man-made creations, such as landscape, buildings, cinema and art.ż