Artists

Natalie Czech Born in 1976 in Neuss, Germany | Lives and works in Berlin

Portrait

Natalie Czech

Natalie Czech

What lyric potential lies hidden in newspapers and books? How do images become verbal and language pictorial? Such questions about relationships and the interaction between image and text have formed the central aspect ofNatalie Czech’s photographic works in recent years.

ForHidden Poems, her group of works she began in 2010, for example, Czech works with illustrated pages from magazines and picture books. She highlights individual words in their articles and passages of text to reveal the existence of a poem, hidden until now, and make it visible. A second text, a poem by writers and poets like Robert Creeley, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann or Robert Lax, is marked in the original text, which remains legible. This brings the poems in conversation with their existing, commented, and expanded contexts, such as the picture of a spectacular sunset, whose supernatural colors—as one learns in the accompanying text—are the result of a nuclear test. Or Czech positions her book page markings in Appropriation Art, which deals with the complex of authorship themes relevant to her own work. In other groups of works, she reverses the subjective process of reading and detection and concentrates on writing’s range of possibilities. For the work,A Small Bouquet by Frank O’Hara, Czech commissioned different writers to compose texts in which to embed the visual structure of a pictorial poem. Czech’s image-text combinations unfold a web of potential meanings and ways to be read, sound out the space beyond inambiguity and linearity. Not least of all, Czech’s image-texts seek the poetic sensations in daily life and point out the poetry lying in everyday contexts.

Education

2000-2005 Kunstakademie DĂĽsseldorf

Solo exhibitions (selection)

2012 Ludlow 38, New York, USA
2011 A small bouquet, Uqbar, Berlin
Galerie Catherine Bastide / Project room, BrĂĽssel, Belgium
A small bouquet, Kunstverein fĂĽr die Rheinlande und Westfalen / Schaufenster
Hidden Poems, Kunstverein Langenhagen
2010 Je n’ai rien á dire. Seulement á montrer., Galerie Katharina Bittel, Hamburg
Two..., Frac des Pays de la Loire, Salle Jean-François Tadei, Carquefou, France
One, Frac Basse-Normandie, Caen, France
2009  Kunst aus NRW / Ehemalige Reichsabtei KornelimĂĽnster, Aachen
2008 without words would / Peter Mertes Stipendium, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn
Time and Timing, Galerie Katharina Bittel, Hamburg
2007 an And and and, BĂĽro DC, Cologne
2006 Studio Kunsthalle Darmstadt

Group exhibitions (selection)

2011 Yeni Aya Cevaben / Respondig to the New Moon / Antworten auf den Neumond:
Prologue, Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin
Unheimlich Vertraut - Bilder des Terrors, C/O Berlin
Anfang gut. Alles gut. / Beginning good. All good. Kunsthaus Bregenz / KUB Arena, Austria
2010 Der diskrete Charme des blinden Flecks, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster
Milk Drop Coronet, Kunsthaus Graz / Camera Austria, Graz, Austria
Ins Blickfeld gerĂĽckt, Institut francais, Berlin
2009 Hardly Anything, Upstairs, Berlin
Die letzten Dinge, Platform Garanti, Istanbul, Turkey
2008 A Sorry Kind of Wisdom, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York, USA
Jahresgaben, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn
La Filature / GroĂźe Erwartungen, Union Gallery, London, Great Britain