In her upcoming exhibition at Despacio, artificial light intertwines with analogue photographs and digital screen prints, swaths of abstract paint are spread over familiar scenes and silhouettes, and images are hung from walls like pages torn from a colossal book. The scene is set for an installation that lies at the crossroads of a book, an exhibition, and an atelier.
Indeed, for Rochat, art spaces are ideal for experimenting with an image’s materiality, and vice versa. Her exhibitions – whose forms are finalized only once she has taken into account the specificities of the space they will occupy – reconfigure the boundaries of her works and play with the representations they contain. In the same way, her books are rarely catalogues, instead serving as extensions of her installations.
A River is a Rock is one of Rochat’s signature journeys through texture and light, marked by shimmering colors, immersive projections, and a healthy disregard for the rules of a typical exhibition. Drawing from the past two years of her photographic production, which she revisits and deconstructs in different scales, Rochat has created an installation full of powerful emotional resonances.
Maya Rochat’s solo show opens on March 3rd and runs through April 14th, 2018. The show’s opening will coincide with the start of the Festival of Minimal Actions and is made possible by the support of Pro Helvetia.
A book of the same name, published by SPBH in October 2017, will be available at the exhibition. Learn more about the artist on her website.
Maya Rochat was born in 1985 in Morge, Switzerland. She lives and works in Lausanne. She has had solo shows at Lily Robert (Paris), Seen Fifteen (London), the Centre d'art Contemporain (Geneva), and Vitrine (Basel), among others. Her work has been on display at the Tate Modern (London), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Aldama Fabre Gallery (Bilbao), the Swiss Art Awards (Basel), and Unseen (Amsterdam). She is represented by the Lily Robert Gallery (Paris).