The exhibition Stories Written brings together 14 prize-winners* from the years 2007 to 2023, in a group show spanning the two uppermost floors of the museum. The selection of works, with a focus on more recent pieces, provides up-to-date insight into each respective artistic practice. Together, the exhibits offer a refreshing overview – not only of contemporary art in Switzerland and abroad, but also of approaches to incorporating the history of constructivist-concrete and conceptual art.
A multi-part work by Latifa Echakhch (born in 1974 in Morocco, lives and works in Vevey) is presented. The four large-format paintings titled Last Black (2024) were created using a décollage technique. This involved applying a thin layer of concrete to the canvases, then painting over them with black acrylic paint. By means of a palette knife, the artist gradually removed parts of the hardened monochrome coating, thus exposing more and more of the (now gray) canvas from picture to picture. The dark patterns that remain are astonishingly delicate and of an almost organic quality. They have a fascinating relationship with the act of forceful removal, which has inscribed itself into the fabric as signs of scratching and scraping. Somewhat unlike other works from the same series, in which figurative fragments of painted subjects based on photographs can be recognized, Last Black brings the material and the procedure itself to the fore. In four parts, the presence and absence, or visibility and invisibility, of canvas, concrete and paint tell of the process of creation and destruction, which plays a central role in Latifa Echakhch’s artwork, both technically and thematically.
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