Sophie Ristelhueber · 2017-08-29 · Sophie Ristelhueber ... would say Mesa Selimovic. No horizons for these horizontal accidents, derisory, of an in fact striking banality. That

Sophie Ristelhueber – Portfolio |

PORTFOLIO | Portfolio

Lives and works in Paris

Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #52, 100 x 127 x 5 cm, black and white photography, silver print mounted on aluminium, courtesy Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris



BIOGRAPHY | Born in 1949 (FR)

Sophie Ristelhueber was one of the first artists to make a reflection on territory and its history, memory and scars through photography. For over thirty years, she has developed a unique approach to the ruins and traces left by mankind in those places devastated by war or by natural and cultural upheaval. As Jacques Rancière wrote about her work in The Emancipated Spectator: “she photographs not the emblem of the war but the wounds and the scars that war stamps on a territory”. She renders visible those veritable memories of the “acts” of history. If she essentially turns to photography in her work, Sophie Ristelhueber utilizes her shooting to create full plastic works, playing with the material and the format of the image, its status, framework and installation in space (photographs, posters, photo-installations, films, artists’ books, etc.). Her work has been exhibited in numerous international institutions, among which MoMA (New York, US), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, US), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, US), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA), The Power Plant (Toronto, CA), Tate Modern (London, GB), Imperial War Museum (London, GB), ZKM ( Karlsruhe, DEU), Folkwang Museum (Essen, DEU), MAMCO (Geneva, CH), biennials of Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Triennial of Etchigo-Tsumari, Krakow Photomonth Festival (Cracovie, PL), Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles, and in Paris, MNAM – Centre Georges-Pompidou, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Musée Zadkine, Musée Rodin ...

Sophie Ristelhueber’s artworks are kept in many public collections among which Museum of Fine Art (Boston, US), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (US), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA), MNAM – Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris, FR), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, (Paris, FR), Victoria & Albert Museum (Londres, GB), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris, FR), Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, FR), Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FR) and different Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain (Bretagne, Haute Normandie, Basse Normandie, Corse, PACA).



PONT ALLENBY | 2016

Despite the emotional distance to the object resulting from the selected framing, the photographs reveal a certain melancholy. The recurved palms of Pont Allenby seem to bend by being confronted to the weight of history. The latent consequences of the 100th of the Sykes-Picot agreements sharing the French and British zones of influence in the Middle East powerfully emerge in this work, in front of a symbolic overcome nature. The landscape, empty in appearance, emerges saturated with meaning.

Pont Allenby is geographically located at the border of three different territories, separating Cisjordania and Syria.

Pont Allenby #1, 2016pigment print on matte Fine Art paper90 x 130 cmEdition of 3 + 1 AP



Pont Allenby #2, 2016pigment print on matte Fine Art paper130 x 90 cmEdition of 3 + 1 AP



Babylone, 2016pigment print on barium Fine Art paper53 x 73 cmEdition of 3 + 1 AP



Thuel, 2016digital printing79 x 120 cmEdition of 3 + 1 AP



Sans titre, 2016pigment print on matte Fine Art paper90 x 130 cmEdition of 3 + 1 AP



Sans titre, 2016pigment print on matte Fine Art paper130 x 90 cm Edition of 3 + 1 AP



Sans titre, 2016pigment print on matte Fine Art paper130 x 90 cm Edition of 3 + 1 AP



PERES | 2014

This film entitled Pères (Fathers) that Sophie Ristelhueber made at the invitation of «Ligne de Front» (Front Line) as part of the commemoration of the First World War centenary, of which one of the other high points is the exhibition «Les désastres de la guerre. 1800-2014» After its preview at the gallery, Pères (Fathers) will then be screened from June 14 to September 28 in Vermelles, in the framework of a histo-rical and artistic itinerary around ten towns of the Artois province that bears the marks of the 1914-1918 front line.

It is in her family home in Vulaines, next to Fontainebleau, that she found the matter of her film. The artist once again took high angle shots, this time not leaning onto the stretches of the Kuwait desert (Fait, 1992), onto the aisles of the Luxembourg Gardens (Le Luxembourg, 2002) or on the paths of the Vercors (Le Chardon, 2007), but on the worn out floors and the threadbare carpets of her childhood home, tram-pled upon by several generations, and particularly by a great-uncle, called up in 1914 and who died in the battlefield in 1916 at the age of 22. It is when reading the letters of her «young» forefather, evoking this house while he was on the front lines, that Ristelhueber decided to work there, far from any theater of war, and yet bearing deep and implicit marks caused by the disappearance of those gone to fight.

The film is carried by the famous Lied Der Elkönig (1813) that Schubert composed at the age of 16 for a poem by Goethe. In it, the German poet describes the frantic race through a forest, on horseback, of a father and his young son, whom he fails to protect from death, ignoring his anxieties and his pleas.

Exhibition view of "Pères" at the Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris, 2014



Pères, 2014Color HD video,13’



Pères, 2014Color HD video,13’



UNTITLED | 2011

The series « Untitled » (2011) directed in the underground of the Latone ornamental pool in Versailles, exhumes in broad daylight the pipe works network which supplies the palace’s waterworks. It is a strange descent in the womb of an architectural beast. And one can guess that the proud order at the surface has been for centuries depending on the cleverly hidden chaos of the lead pipe network.

With these new images, Sophie Ristelhueber investigates another ground, she opens another front, that which lies under our feet. We enter an unsuspected territory, similar to a body. The shades are grey, ochre, muddy. We can follow the outlines as in a functional exploration. We are in real life, in complete fiction. The ambivalence of the subject is striking, as is the artist's vocabulary concerning tracks, scars or borders. They record time and life erosion. Everything intertwines in the approach of our bodies towards these images, and in the inner sight it arouses.

Untitled (1), 2011Color photograph, pigment print on paper laminated on aluminium, framed100 x 150 cmEdition of 3 + 2 AP









TRACK | 2012

In her series Track, the artist offers an unprecedented approach to landscape, in black and white, taken in France in 1984. “The new works of Sophie Ristelhueber are painted photographs, where the various manipulations to which they are subjected underline the material, the texture and the gesture, while confusing them. (...) The railway line, seen here as a passage between different spaces and perspectives, is the metaphor of a reality that we want to shape and control” – extract from an unpublished text by Jacinto Lageira in 2012.

Track #1, 2012Pigment print with acrylic100 x 150 cmEdition of 3 + 2 AP












Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups, 2006 Artist book made of 28 pages including 11 images.Bookstorming Edition, Paris25 x 31,83 cmSold out print.

Distancing herself more than ever from the idea of documenting or recording reality through photo-graphy, the eleven images from Eleven blowups consist of works in themselves. Particularly marked by the attack that cost the life of Rafic Hariri in 2005, creating a gigantic crater in the street of Beirut, Sophie Ristelhueber viewed three years in the audiovisual archives at Reuters in order to study thou-sands of images of attacks and bombardments, peering into the craters that thereby resulted, concen-trating on their topography while attempting to abstract herself from the human dramas that were linked to them. It’s from a synthesis of these visions that she composed, thanks to computer software, using indistinctly some fragments from her own images taken during twenty years from Asia Minor to the Middle East, and that she realized by digital collage to depict thus a picture, a composite uni-versal landscape.

The eleven photographs from Eleven Blowups were exhibited the first time at the Rencontres photo-graphiques d’Arles in 2006, then at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in 2009. These works gave rise to some silver prints in color (edition of 3) and as well to some serigraphs on glass (120 x 146 cm, edition of 3).

ELEVEN BLOWUPS | 2006



Eleven Blowups #1, 2006Colour silver print mounted on aluminium and framed, 110 x 133 cm each Edition of 3









STITCHES | 2005

The 11 black and white photographs of the Stitches series, taken in Palestinian cities, attach themselves to frozen ground details and to their epidermis. These close-ups can certainly recall from a distance lunar regions, even footprints left in Hiroshima; but they rather record, as still-life captured along the streets, matters, marks, traces, “and spaces, that take us over while we can’t possess them”, would say Mesa Selimovic. No horizons for these horizontal accidents, derisory, of an in fact striking banality. That reality is overwhelming by being hollowed and flat! There remains on the planetary theatre (where men’s hearts beat) the debris and gashes that generate scraps and scars, a theme crossing all the work of Sophie Ristelhueber. The photographs are joined by a dozen of cross point embroidery, with patterns created by words pronounced by Georges Bush in different speeches. The violence and news on political speech is confronted to the fragility and obsolescence of embroidery.

Exhibition view at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2005



Stitches #1, 2005Black and white photography, silver print, laminated on aluminium and framed under 60 x 90 cmEdition of 3

The Cause, 2005Canevas embroidered at the cross stitch framed under glass30 x 30 cmUnique piece



Stitches #9, 2005Black and white photography, silver print, laminated on aluminium and framed under 60 x 90 cmEdition of 3

Our Allies, 2005Canevas embroidered at the cross stitch framed under glass30 x 30 cmUnique piece



WB | 2005

A stone war. Not the « War of the Stones » but a war between stones. Sophie Ristelhueber's eye reveals to the Palestinian ground traveller what he feels without always finding the words to express it. As if the picture showed the essence, the hidden stake of the confrontation between two connections to nature, two ways of being in a same place: the softness of the simple, patient, and so loving landscape moulded by the occupied, violence of the landscape produced by the occupants.

Starting from a simple observation – did Sophie Ristelhueber know the expression « road blockers » to refer to highwaymen? –, the photographer («Doubtless, as an artist, I am at war, too», she writes) has undertaken to relate the occupation focusing on the so many broken off, battered and banned roads and paths, not by the so sadly well known « check points » but by the stones themselves.

Sophie Ristelhueber, WB, 200610,7 x 17 cmArtist book made of 112 pages including 54 colour photographsThames & Hudson, London and Paris



WB #01, 2005Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium120 x 150 cm eachEdition of 3 + 1 AP












Dead Set signifies ‘firmly decided or determined’. For Sophie Ristelhueber this means: ‘It’s absolutely what I see!’ When she travels and operates as an artist, she immediately sees what she has to show, at the first level, without lengthy hesitation, reframing or reworking her subject - and in the same movement, which comes from her careful reconnaissance, she suggests a second level. In the ‘dead set’ of works we are confronted with aridity of the landscape, the barred horizon, things disarticulated and death. In other words Sophie Ristelhueber marks life as stopped, as unfulfilled …

Dead Set displays the skeletons of buildings and ruins clear of any machines or objects that could suggest that the work is still unfinished. Contemporary worksites engulfed by silence join the colonnade of anti-quity: ‘I photograph real things that are already no longer’.

Rainer Michael Mason, 2001

DEAD SET | 2001

Dead Set, 2001Pigment print mounted on aluminium90 x 135cmEdition of 3



Dead Set, 2001Pigment print mounted on aluminium90 x 135 cmEdition of 3



Dead Set, 2001Pigment print mounted on aluminium90 x 135 cmEdition of 3



“How to render homage while making a work? How to create, approach the acts of society, hold back the anger that is in me, without falling into activism?” Sophie Ristelhueber asked herself. Upon her return from a trip in Yugoslavia in July, 1991, while the conflict between Serbs and Croats was just beginning. With drawings to support her, she projected carrying out a series of photographs of scars, traced upon the bodies following some surgical procedures. The photographs were taken not in Sarajevo but, quietly, in a Paris hospital. “The link with Yugoslavia will be clear”... Arises from this project fourteen black and white silver prints, from which Sophie Ristelhueber then made single prints, enlarging them to the dimensions of an art work of large format. Out of the fourteen distinct photographs that made up the series Every One, only seven were printed in 1994.

Unique editions, the majority of these works are to be found today in public and private collections (Museum of Fine Arts in Boston ; Victoria and Albert Museum London, Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris). Every One #3 was exhibited in several exhibitions among which the most recent at the Musée Rodin in Paris, confronting this image with sutured plaster casts by Auguste Rodin.

EVERY ONE | 1994

Every One, 1994Artist book14 x 9cm, 64 pagesOut of print



Every One #5, 1994Black and white photograph, silver print laminated on wood fiber plaque180 x 270 cmUniquePrivate Collection



Every One #3, 1994Black and white photograph, silver print laminated on wood fiber plaque270 x 180 cmUniqueCollection of the artist



Every One #14, 1994Black and white photograph, silver print laminated on wood fiber plaque270 x 180 cmUniqueVictoria & Albert Museum's Collection, London



FAIT | 1992

Fait originated with a photograph published in the February 25, 1991 edition of Time magazine: a monochrome aerial view of the Kuwaiti desert. “I had been obsessed with the idea of this desert that was no longer one”, explained Sophie Ristelhueber who had arrived in Kuwait in October 1991, seven months after the end of the war. She succeeded in negotiating in conditions just as precarious as random to fly over the desert in an airplane or helicopter during four weeks, shooting the almost abstract traces of the conflict drawn on the surface of a desert that she was also going to survey on foot with her camera. The 71 photographs of the series Fait gave rise to large format prints fitted exactly à fleur de champ in a waxed wooden frame by the artist, hoisting these images to the status of veritable icons. They were published in a work designed by the artist, that hence is out of print, having become a cult object.

The Fait series has been exhibited in numerous institutions, among which Museum of Modern Art de New-York, Imperial War Museum in London, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Albright-Know Art Gallery in Buffalo (US), Power Plant in Toronto, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, etc. Each photograph of the series was limited to three copies. The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, acquired in 2013 the complete series of seventy-one photographs numbered 3/3.

Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait, 199210,7 x 17 cmArtist bookThames and Hudson, London and Paris



Fait #28, 1992Colour or black and white photograph, silver print with golden polished frame100 x 126 x 5 cmEdition of 3 (no artist proof)












MEMOIRES DU LOT | 1990

With Mémoires du Lot (Memories of the Lot), produced in 1990 in response to a commission by the regional authorities who were impressed by the artist’s earlier work for the Datar, Sophie Ristelhueber became openly involved in fiction, with a series of four photographs forming a quasi allegorical represen-tation of life. The major themes depicted by this piece –humankind, the animal kingdom, landscape and territory– are the outcome of an intellectual constructs made in the studio, but they exist also as photo-graphic “truths”. In this way, Sophie Ristelhueber used photographs taken in the Negev desert, in the Jar-din des Plantes in Paris, and in her own home with a friend. The extract she chose for the deliberately tiny book that she subsequently made is taken from the Prologue of the Book of Ecclesiastes, which relates all individual events to the general flux of things and refers the iconographic work to its twofold truth.

Mémoires du Lot, which is the most accomplished example of Sophie Ristelhueber’s fine semantic weave, is also the work whose conception is the most literally separable from its execution. The so called field photographs were in fact taken or chosen in the artist’s studio.

Ann Hindry, 1998

Artist BookMémoires du Lot II, 199011,3 x 8,5 cm, 24 pages350 numbered copies



Mémoires du Lot II, 1990Black and white photography159 x 126 cmEdition of 3



After having participated in the famous photographic mission of the DATAR in 1984/1987, Sophie Ristelhueber was in vited in 1989 within the context of a twinning between French and Soviet cities. It was proposed that she photograph Armenia that had just been rocked by a major earthquake. Once again Sophie Ristelhueber presented photographs in color this time of a modern but nevertheless timeless architecture in ruins. “There, within the circle of the earthquake, among the cities of Kirovakan, Spitak and Leninakan, I wanted to show that landscape of desolation in color, but with attenuated almost monochromatic colors, with the perspective of those buildings that collapsed from the inside”.

This series of five color photographs has only been exhibited once in 1991 within the framework of an exhibition organized by the Bourse du Commerce in Paris.

Arménie, 1989Silver color print50 x 60 cmEdition of 3

ARMÉNIE | 1989









In Vulaines of 1989, the fiction is rendered more complex by an obvious autobiographical ingredient. (It would doubtless be more apt to reverse the proposal and say that the autobiographical dimension called for fiction...). These are very large format diptychs for an intimate subject. On the left, there is a very narrow black-and-white photo that depicts people, mainly children, in a blurred rendition like old family albums, and on the right we have the plan of an interior in colour and in very large format.The whole is akin to an installation, such is the importance that the artist attaches to the framing –frames that are at once exquisite and antiquated and “bourgeois”, covered with Cordoba paper for the colour photographs and Chinese paper for the black-and-white photographs. Equally important is and the positioning of the works, at floor level, in such a way that they submerge the onlooker the way objects belonging to the grown-up world submerge children. This, incidentally, is the subject of the “interiors” part of the diptych: the ambivalence of given things. Here, the objects are photographed through the eye of a child, that is, both disproportioned and mysterious: a counterpane is just as much as a landscape, a strip of wallpaper turns into a map. The emotional factor of the “secret” (Vulaines is the name of the village where the family home stands) called for taking a long step back. This was achieved by the writing. The 1989 photographs, along with a dozen photographs.

This was achieved by the writing. The 1989 photographs, along with a dozen photographs taken in1995, were brought together in a book titled Les Barricades mystérieuses (The Mysterious Barricades), which the artist introduces with an excerpt from Lawrence Sterne’s masterpiece novel,Tristram Shandy. This is a work that is little known in France, but it is one of the great classics of English literature, which even gave rise to a very fashionable-eighteen-century expression, “Shandyism”, describing a distressed reflection about solitude, and the impossibility of speaking about oneself.

Ann Hindry, Hazan, Paris, 1998

VULAINES | 1989



Vulaines I, 1989Silver color print, laminated on aluminium, with wallpaper covered frameDiptych 167,5 x 208 cm et 167,5 x 208 cmUnique, Collection of the artist



Vulaines V, 1989Silver color print, laminated on aluminium, with wallpaper covered frameDiptych 232 x 185 and 232 x 64 cmUnique, Collection of the artist



Vulaines VII, 1989Silver color print, laminated on aluminium, with wallpaper covered frameDiptych 232 x 185 and 232 x 64 cmUnique, Collection of the artist



BEYROUTH | 1984

Beyrouth, photographies, 1984 Silver black and white print50 x 60 cm

This series of 31 black and white photographs was the founding factor for Sophie Ristelhueber’s work. During full civil war, the artist left for Beirut in 1982 with the idea of making a work based on the modern city in ruins. If she utilized the means and took risks, Sophie Ristelhueber found herself at that time to be the exact opposite of the journalistic logic of photojournalism. It was a matter of photographing rather than documenting. Sophie Ristelhueber photographed contemporary ruins with no human presence, vo-luntarily avoiding any romanticism. This work was based on the terrain of history, and not that of current events which in turn put into perspective the ruins of modernity and those of Antiquity.

Sophie Ristelhueber issued these 31 photographs in an artist’s book published by Hazan in 1984, for which she chose as an introduction a text by Lucretia on earthquakes. Conserved within the collections of the Cabinet des Estampes de Genève and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, this series resulted in individual prints made in the 1980s and limited to 5 copies.







Documents

Sophie Ristelhueber · 2017-08-29 · Sophie Ristelhueber ... would say Mesa Selimovic. No horizons for these horizontal accidents, derisory, of an in fact striking banality. That