The viewers of my work can always project a future action on it. I propose something that has an aura of being bigger than the object in and of itself. It’s stranger than a still life. – Latifa Echakhch
Through installations, sculptures, and painting, Latifa Echakhch suspends time and reality in her surreal works. They are dramatic yet filled with absences, voids, missing parts, or sections blackened by ink. Here, a painting of deep space with swirling colors and speckled stars appears to crumble away from a slab of concrete. This falling sky motif has been repeated by Echakhch similarly in other frescoes, as well as in her elaborate theatrical installations like Inking which featured cloud set pieces barely touching the floor, and in La dépossession which featured a sagging, sunny theater backdrop presented at the Centre Pompidou after she won the Prix Marcel Duchamp. Echakhch was born in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco, and currently lives in the Swiss cities of Martigny and Vevey. Her work has been widely exhibited in one-person exhibitions at institutions including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthaus Zurich; MACBA, Barcelona; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; Swiss Institute, New York; Tate Modern, London; and Fondazione Memmo, Rome. She has participated in the Istanbul Biennial, the 54th Venice Biennale, the 11th Sharjah Biennial, and Manifesta 7 in Bolzano, Italy. She was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2013 and the Zurich Art Prize in 2015, and in 2022 she represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale.
