7/28/2019 Susanne Themlitz, Eng, Vis 7, Jan 2000

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Egomaniacs and Imperfect Ones: Susanne Themlitz

Susanne Themlitz is certainly one of the more interesting young artists working inPortugal today. After a particularly fresh and noteworthy presence at the Maia Biennale

last summer and an excellent and evocative solo exhibition, Quiproquo, at the Chiado

Museum, also in 1999, Themlitz now returns to Lisbon with a one-person show that

doesnt disappoint.

Themlitz has, over the past few years, worked in a recognisable idiom, diversely

combining sculpture (of the most pinched, formless and often poignantly humorous

variety), video, drawing and photography. Her use of photography is particularly

remarkable in its revival and re-appraisal of surrealist techniques of juxtaposition and

collage, techniques that Themlitz absorbs and uses alongside the technologies offered by

Photoshop. The resulting works in no way serve as a pretext for mere technological

fancy. Rather, they are invocations, as in Themlitzs earlier work, of a poetic, whimsical,

and sometimes more darkly ironic sensibility.

Egomaniacs and Imperfect Ones is a photographic gallery of early twentieth century

characters humans and animals all of them bearing identifiable or less identifiable

traces of the artists own physiognomy. Working with original old glass negatives, a

computer and a camera, Themlitz has produced enchanting works that light-heartedly

probe both identity and identification. As always in her work, the human and the animal

are affectionately combined. On the walls of the gallery, she has drawn in pencil animals

whose quirky, sometimes anthropomorphic presence throws the photographs into

strong relief.

Ruth RosengartenViso, 3 February 2000.

Egomaniacos e Imperfeitos, Galeria Lus Serpa, Lisbon, 2000.