Duo Francesca Marcaccio
The Swiss-born, Amsterdam-based artist Batia Suter (b. 1967) studied at the art academies of Zürich (CH) and Arnhem (NL), and was also trained at the Werkplaats Typografie. Suter produces monumental installations of digitally manipulated images for specific locations, and works on photo-animations, image sequences and collages, often using found historical pictures. In 2007 and 2016 she published Parallel Encyclopedia and Parallel Encyclopedia #2, artist books based on compositions of images taken from old books she has collected along the years. Her other books Surface Series, Radial Grammar and Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin) are evocative montages of found images exploring the diverse resonances of geological shapes and landscapes, visual surfaces and image structures.
The underlying themes of Batia Suter’s practice are the ‘iconification’ and ‘immunogenicity’ of images, and the circumstances by which they become charged with new associative values. Her work intuitively situates old images in new contexts to provoke surprising reactions and significative possibilities. By this method, and with an attuned sensitivity to hidden harmonies and expressive accidents, Suter thus generates hypnagogic spaces where pictures can communicate by their own logic, in a force field of imaginative metamorphosis.
