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Gallery Elena Shchukina presents the first-ever UK exhibition for Amélie Ducommun.
The exhibition features works from the artist’s latest series Sensitive Water Mapping, exploring her long-standing interest in questions of time and memory, as experienced through the perception of the natural landscape. Driven by a constant search for the new, a “need to arrive at a place where everything needs to be felt for the first time”, Ducommun draws creative inspiration from discovering new panoramas and unfamiliar geographies.
Sensitive Water Mapping continues Gallery Elena Shchukina’s ongoing programme of exhibitions exploring our relationship with nature, with past shows by Allan Forsyth, Luke Jerram, Seung-Hwan Oh, Kyosuke Tchinai and Xawery Wolski.
“Mapping as a memory of the place”
In is in the memories of her encounters with nature that Ducommun’s work originates. In Sensitive Water Mapping, richly textured paintings evoke memories of aquatic landscapes. These works are the fruit of research on rivers and streams, speaking about the footprints of two elements: water and stone. With her work, Ducommun simultaneously transcribes her own memory of felt experience, and maps the traces of time and history beheld in the landscape itself.
Ducommun builds her paintings as they appear to her in her memory, in successive layers. Slowly combining thick brushstrokes of cobalt, swirls of brilliant white and explosive bursts of greens, yellow and reds, in her process we can witness the materialisation in paint of “memories that appear, disappear, overlap, forget themselves and one day resurface”
Just like the ‘mental landscapes’ in her memory, the colours and textures of her paintings become entangled, inextricably bound to each other. Ducommun’s mapping process is durational and multidimensional; the resulting pictures trace myriad places and memories. As the artist explains:
“Each painting is not bound to one location. They contain several places, they are the result of the layering and intermingling of memories of felt experience”
Amélie Ducommun is a French-Swiss artist, working and residing in Barcelona. She was born in 1983 and graduated from Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris (ENSAD) and the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona.
Ducommun's striking paintings attempt to harness both the beauty and energy of natural landscapes. A seasoned traveler, the artist draws her creative inspiration from discovering new panoramas and exploring unfamiliar geographies. Much of her work focuses on the temporality and subjectivity of memory, foregrounding questions of perception and emotion, as well as the interrelation between natural elements. For Ducommun, truth can be found in first impressions, the fleeting moment when unfamiliarity compels a focus on emotional candor and unbiased observation.
Ducommun has participated inmore than 60 exhibitions internationally, including Dak'art, and the Beijing Contemporary Art Biennale, and was silver medalist at the 9th painting games of the Francophonie in Nice.
Gallery Elena Shchukina is a contemporary art gallery located in Mayfair that draws from a pool of established and emerging international artists exhibiting identifiable or innovative techniques.
The Gallery offers a stimulating schedule of art and cultural events, workshops and lectures, and has an e-commerce platform offering work by a set of primarily UK-based artists.
