Egomaniacs and Imperfect Ones: Susanne Themlitz

Susanne Themlitz is certainly one of the more interesting young artists working in Portugal today. After a particularly fresh and noteworthy presence at the Maia Biennale last summer and an excellent and evocative solo exhibition, Quiproquo, at the Chiado Museum, also in 1999, Themlitz now returns to Lisbon with a one-person show that doesnt disappoint. Themlitz has, over the past few years, worked in a recognisable idiom, diversely combining sculpture (of the most pinched, formless and often poignantly humorous variety), video, drawing and photography. Her use of photography is particularly remarkable in its revival and re-appraisal of surrealist techniques of juxtaposition and collage, techniques that Themlitz absorbs and uses alongside the technologies offered by Photoshop. The resulting works in no way serve as a pretext for mere technological fancy. Rather, they are invocations, as in Themlitzs earlier work, of a poetic, whimsical, and sometimes more darkly ironic sensibility. Egomaniacs and Imperfect Ones is a photographic gallery of early twentieth century characters humans and animals all of them bearing identifiable or less identifiable traces of the artists own physiognomy. Working with original old glass negatives, a computer and a camera, Themlitz has produced enchanting works that light-heartedly probe both identity and identification. As always in her work, the human and the animal are affectionately combined. On the walls of the gallery, she has drawn in pencil animals whose quirky, sometimes anthropomorphic presence throws the photographs into strong relief.

Ruth Rosengarten Viso, 3 February 2000. Egomaniacos e Imperfeitos, Galeria Lus Serpa, Lisbon, 2000.