ART CITIES: London-Latifa Echakhch

With her works, above all, her installations and environments, Latifa Echakhch invites the viewer to reflect on the rigidity and contradictions of society. Using diverse techniques, Echakhch confronts the modern world’s socio-political and cultural issues through objects loaded with symbolic meanings: she decontextualises them, placing them in a space full of possibility, which encourages an active reading from viewers.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

Latifa Echakhch in her solo exhibition “Night Time” presents a suite of new paintings. Describing her work as “a question of power and postures”, Echakhch states she has “no other goals but questioning the world around me”. Throughout her career, Echakhch has constructed a visual vocabulary of signs, systems, and references that are rooted in her impulse to convey the experience of a feeling, to transcend that which is easily defined and arrive at the intangible. The series of works is connected to “The Concert”, her presentation at the Swiss pavilion in Venice, where she will employ abstract conditions of light, form, and sound theory to provoke an experience akin to “leaving a concert”, in which a visitor’s “heartbeat [is] transformed, more calm, more intense”. The new body of work at is the artist’s most figurative to date, bringing the presence of the body into her distinctive visual lexicon. Enlisting ideas of theatricality and performativity, this exhibition transforms the galleries into an immersive environment in which Echakhch controls the viewing conditions of her work, inviting visitors into her world. The paintings in “Night Time” begin with photographs taken by a friend of Echakhch, the photographer Sim Ouch. Characterized by high exposure and enigmatic compositions in which bodies and limbs are entangled or twisted, the images capture the nightlife of their community of friends in Lausanne, Switzerland. Echakhch employs a naive fresco method of painting to transpose these images onto canvas, which she treats with a mix of concrete and vinyl glue. Once set, Echakhch cuts into the dense material, a violent and labor-intensive process that leaves cracks and voids in the composition, revealing fragmented bodies in motion below. The striations in the concrete speak at once to geography of maps and the mountainous landscape that surrounds her studio in Switzerland, as well as the histories of formalism and abstraction.

Born in 1974 in Morocco, Latifa Echakhch lives and works between Vevey and Martigny (Switzerland). Driven by the necessity to counter certain prejudices, contradictions, and stereotypes in our society, she isolates and questions materials that are symbolic for these phenomena. In 2007, Echakhch presented “A chaque stencil une revolution” at Le Magasin, Grenoble, as part of her first solo museum exhibition. Latifa Echakhch’s work has since been presented in France and abroad in numerous solo exhibitions: at Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the macLYON in Lyon, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MACBA in Barcelona, FRI ART in Friborg, Frac Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, Swiss Institute in New York, Tate Modern in London, Le Magasin in Grenoble; as well as group exhibitions; and as part of the Istanbul Biennial, the 54th Venice Biennial, the 11th Sharjah Biennial, the Jerusalem Art Focus Biennial and the Manifesta 7 in Bolzano. In 2018, her work has been exhibited at KIOSK in Ghent, the New National Museum of Monaco, Contemporary Copenhagen, Denmark, and in 2019 at the Memmo Foundation in Rome, Italy. In 2015, Echakhch presented Screen Shot at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, and she was awarded the Zurich Art Prize. Echakhch won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2013. As Alfred Pacquement, then-Director of the Centre Pompidou and head of the jury for the award, said of the artist at the time, “Her work, between surrealism and conceptualism, questions with economy and precision the importance of symbols and reflects the fragility of modernism”.

Photo: Latifa Echakhch, Night Time (As Seen by Sim Ouch) [detail], 2022,  Acrylic and concrete on canvas, 202 x 152 x 4 cm, © Latifa Echakhch, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 23/3-4/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://www.pacegallery.com/