Verliebt in die Planeten... (In love with the planets...)

Dominique Lämmli combines playful lightness with image fragments from different media backgrounds. In her works, the artist aims to achieve a deformation of the visible through her reactive interventions, which she mainly derives from digital image processing. Her work is a mixture of media and themes and it is filled with diversity. As the art critic, Konrad Bitterli, aptly formulates, there is an almost “irrational” structure in which ‘the eye threatens to lose itself as in a labyrinth.’.

Dominique Lämmli creates illusory spaces that are torn up and decomposed through themed set pieces. The clusters of apparently freely combined subjects create an excess of meaning, which evokes irrational and imaginary worlds.

In her most recent works, the motif gets almost completely lost; it is replaced by an equally complex conglomerate of patterns and textures which, in turn, are spatially staggered. The surface structures are thereby manifold in their multiple overlapping of spatial structures and the abstract compositions remind, with their depth effect, of landscapes. Even though Lämmli is gradually dissociating from the realistic visual language, her most recent works still convey the effect of unfathomable dream worlds.

In her first exhibition at the Bob Gysin Gallery, Dominique Lämmli presents a comprehensive cycle of picturesque “primordial landscapes”, which she juxtaposes with cryptic, large-scale drawings. Lämmli’s complex visual clusters are composed of half-photographed semi-free elements. The artist follows the collage principles. The starting point for her painterly or graphic extensions is usually her own pictures, which she gladly reduces to abstract and ornamental images. For Lämmli, shaping and composing is a constant process. Through countless steps, the artist combines different pictorial elements and then directly works on them through manual practice with the help of digital image-processing. In fact, her works always go through several stages of reproduction and transformation. Lämmli gains a high level of creative freedom from the production process by making full use of the free linkability of stored data. With her combinatorial blends, the artist achieves forms of cross-genre syntheses. Her often highly compacted images are therefore characterized less by unity or totality than by heterogeneity and inconsistency.

From a purely formal point of view, the work in its valid version combines the ‘haptic’ quality of the wide brush application and the doodle line with the smooth high-gloss aesthetics of photography. Lämmli combines the brittleness of the artistic “hand”-face with the latest reproduction techniques and demonstrates the citation character of our visual experience.

Biography Dominique Lämmli