Ann Böttcher

ANN BÖTTCHER
DER UMGANG MIT MUTTER GRÜN
MARCH 14, 2008

Galerie Nordenhake is pleased to present Swedish artist Ann Böttcher's first solo exhibition at the gallery. She will be exhibiting a new series of drawings and collages, which continue her personal investigation into national identity's historically burdened relationship to the landscape. Her delicate, meticulous drawings are an immediate aesthetic impression on the viewer. However, the research process behind her work reveals, upon closer inspection, a visual archaeology of the facts, myths, memories and values by which "culture" attempts to represent "nature".

The current exhibition extends work Böttcher began in 2006 on Tacitus' account of the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest in 9 A.D, in which the Roman army lost to the German tribes led by Arminius (Hermann der Cherusker). Tacitus' description of the battle and the purity of the "people of Germany" served as the basis for successive waves of Romantic nationalism, for example, in the racial theories of the National Socialists, who saw Germania as the birth certificate of the German Volk, "as natural in its surroundings as the native trees and plants."

The title of Böttcher's series of collages and drawings refers to a book written in 1929 by Walther Schoenichen, under the full title of Der Umgang mit Mutter Grün: Ein Sünden- und Sittenbuch für Jedermann (In the Company of Mother Earth: An Everyman's Book of Vice and Virtue). Schoenichen was a German biologist and environmentalist, and also an early member of the NSDAP. Göring appointed him in 1942 as Director of the Reich Forest Ministry. Photogravures of selected pages from Schoenichen's book Urwaldwildnis in deutschen Landen (German Primeval Wilderness) will be displayed in the exhibition on a table under glass, interacting with Böttcher's rich collages of index cards, notes, quotations, and photographs that reflect on official Third Reich policy concerning its "woodland heritage". Slowly, an image of the forest emerges as a living monument to the German sensibility: its portrayed purity is a constructed projection of human imagination, an uncanny, abstract portrait of marching soldiers, standing tall and firm against the wind, in the form of stately spruces.

Böttcher presents an archive of national identity naturalized in the landscape through a variety of references - from the construction of the Autobahn as a platform upon which drivers can reflect on the "great wonder of nature", to Caspar David Friedrich's sublime landscapes in which the solitary genius finds his profound melancholia reciprocated by the environment. In a second work, comprised of seven drawings, Böttcher revisits Dürer's Pine Tree (1495-97), a watercolor study composed in his Nuremberg studio. This tree would faintly show up again in Dürer's landscape of St. Jerome in the Wilderness (1495), a Renaissance premonition of the enlightened individual fleeing to nature for solace. In each of her drawings, Böttcher maintains a tension between her source imagery, in which trees stand proud, upright, almost human, and her own revision. The trees are no longer able to bear the images projected onto them; their branches sink lower, giving up the burden of their past, as if they were allowed by Böttcher's hand to finally breathe a sigh of relief.

Opening: Friday, March 14, 2008, 18.00-20.00
Exhibition period: March 15-April 26, 2008
Installation views are available after the opening at www.nordenhake.com
Please contact the gallery for further information and press images

Ann Böttcher was born in 1973 in Bruzaholm, Sweden.

She lives and works in Malmö and New York.

She studied at the Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm and has a Master of Fine Arts from the Malmö Art Academy. She has participated in group exhibitions such as "The Moderna Exhibition 2006" at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006), Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2006), "Altered, Stitched and Gathered," at P.S. 1 MOMA, New York (2006), "The Life of the Land", at Gallery Murray Guy, New York (2006), "Delayed on Time" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2004), and "Le Songe d'une nuit d'été" at Magasin 3 Konsthall, Stockholm and Centre Culturel Suédois, Paris (2003). Her solo exhibitions include "The Entrance to the Sanatorium", INDEX, Stockholm (2007), "The 1st at Moderna" at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006), and "Yosemite National Park (A Recollection of the Wilderness)" at Simon Says c/o Enkehuset, Stockholm (2003). In 2005-2006, Böttcher completed an ISCP residency in New York. She was an artist-in-residence at the Rooseum in Malmö in 2004, participated in an IASPIS residency in Stockholm (2003/2004), and has received numerous grants such as the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation (2003), the Ellen Trotzigs Fond (2004), and the Helga Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse (2004 and 2002).