Then

Karen Irmer, Leta Peer

The view of the other – the familiar and the alien, the nearby and the distant, the other and one’s own identity and origins — shapes the work of the artists Karen Irmer and Leta Peer in an incisive way. Their original pictorial systems bring together their respective photographic positions in highly topical artistic designs. Leta Peer (1964 – 2012) photographed her own paintings of the Swiss mountain landscape in which she grew up and mounted them in alien, open, cold, exposed spaces. The photographs of Karen Irmer (*1974) convey existence as a state of permanent transition. Although they were created in very diverse landscapes, they can never be definitely located. Then – the past and the future, what has been and what may come, the prophetic and the coincidental – shows the dialogue of two unique photographic views: of a world and from a world in transition whose nearness and distance are increasingly dissolving.