Lot 25: ESTHER TEICHMANN

Mythologies
Accompanied by a signed Certificate of Authenticity. Number 3 from an edition of 3.

89.2 x 112.7 cm. (35 1/8 x 44 3/8 in).

Unique hand-painted colour coupler print, flush-mounted.

2008

In Our World: New Photography from Britain, Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy, 20 April - 13 July 2008 (another example exhibited)

Man&Eve, London

‘Water appears in a lot of my pictures. It stands for a desire to return to something, a uterine, primordial fantasy of return, but also a desire to be outside of yourself... Water as a containing and holding thing, like a boat floating, but also covering and cloaking. Water as a place of escape, almost of your own physicality. That’s something I’ve returned to a lot, that it’s a way to escape your body and its separateness from everything else.
 
The people in the pictures are not returning the gaze of the camera. It’s about them becoming the individuals who are imagining this fantasy landscape… They are turned away, as though withdrawn inside themselves in a state of imagining or dreaming. By making something physical I create a world I can both momentarily control
and escape into.
 
I have begun painting into some of the pictures. It was a way of working outside but having control and maintaining the element of fantasy, in the way I do when I work in the studio. I suppose by painting into them, they almost become like painted theatre backdrops, which I have worked with in some images. I want to take it away from it being about a specific place. Perhaps it is about it being an impossible place.’
 
Esther Teichmann, from an interview with Richard West, ‘An Impossible Place’, Source, July 2008, Issue 55, p. 37