N.Lichtig, Pictures of Nothing (pencil and oil on canvas—variable sizes, sound pieces—variable lengths, gold leaf on paper/print on paper—variable sizes), 2012 — ongoing

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Pictures of Nothing takes its origin in letters of my family which have been addressed to me in German, Czech, Hungarian and for some in Cyrillic writing, and which for some I hardly understand, either because of a lack of knowledge of the language, or the confused thoughts they were expressing — but to which I have nevertheless a strong emotional understanding. I extracted forms, parts of these hand written words, and transposed them onto canvas. These initial drawings I then overlayerd with oil colors and diluants, partly disolving them.

 

The sound pieces retrace the extracted fragments as they are drawn on the canvas and before they partly disppear: in these sound pieces one can hear me say the fragments of words extracted from the letters. The sound pieces are shown in different ways, e.g. for a show that happend outside, in fields near a country road, the sound was broadcast on the local radio once a while. In the exhibition of the Kai 10 where a space was dedicated to the series, the sound piece was to be heard once a day at a specific time.

 

The lettres I have worked with, I have then covered with partly with gold plates, making their reading inaccessible. I show these gold-plated letters also as prints.

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2020 in: Le Reservoir, cur. by Clémence Boisanté/Bernard Teulon, Sète, France.

2018 in: Catching the Light, cur. by Ludwig Seyfarth, Kai 10 / Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany.

2014 in: Pictures of Nothing, cur. by Jan Ketz, Raum für Zweckfreiheit, Berlin.

2013 in: Memory Gardens, cur. by Hélène Audiffren, Annexe, MRAC, Sérignan, France.