Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky’s artistic practice is centered around her personal experience of nature, especially concerning the meeting point of nature and culture. The starting point comes both from small discoveries within the realm of botany and biology, and from the complex natural systems described in scientific research. Throughout her artistic practice, the cultural history of food has been an important subject. She uses plants and their fruits, seeds and leaves as working material and explores these juxtapositions through the medium of photography, as well as experimentation with other means of reproduction.
During Unseen Bradwolff & Partners present a grid of photograms in which we follow Kovacovsky’s research on giving nature its own voice that reverberates poetically poetically through the images. A photogram is a print of an object that has been placed directly on light-sensitive material and then exposed. This work series derives from her fascination for the patterns of holes in leaves eaten by caterpillars. She observes these somewhat brutal alterations by printing the leaves like negatives in an analog color darkroom. The ‘leaf negatives‘ are placed in the negative holder of an enlarger and in this way enlarged, cropped, arranged and printed as if each were a piece of film negative. In this project chance is a major force within the process due to the complete darkness during printing. Thus, original compositions as she found them in nature are transformed into disorienting, beautiful and sometimes psychedelic impressions that originate in the real world that seems yet far away.
The book Fotogramme (working title) will be published by Roma Publications later this year. It is designed by Dongyoung Lee and Roger Willems. The book design follows an index-style approach to the 700 prints from the series Fotogramme (produced between 2012 and 2015). All of these prints will be represented in various sizes, in chronological order, and indexed in the final signature. The book will include three commissioned essays with authors from different fields. It will include a biological angle focusing on the host-guest relationship between trees (and their leaves) and insects by Margot and Roland Spohn, a philosophical angle discussing human-nature interdependence by Sina Ribak and a photo/art historical angle and context of leaves and plants in photographic imaging traditions by Taco Hidde Bakker.
Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky (1980, Switzerland) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel. Her work has been exhibited frequently, including solo exhibitions in Kunstfort Vijfhuizen (NL), in Bäckerei Berlin (DE), Galerie STAMPA, Basel (CH), Aargauer Kunsthaus. Group exhibitions she participated were, among others CO Berlin, UM Festival, Gerswalde (DE), Kunsthall Stavanger (NO), Fotografiska, Stockholm (SE), Kunstmuseum Thun / Thun-Panorama (CH), FOAM Amsterdam (NL). She has been a guest teacher at art academies in Karlsruhe, Ghent and Amsterdam. Her work is included in various public and private art collections.
http://lenscratch.com/2015/07/eva-fiore-kovacovsky-fotogramme