“I was always interested in the exotic and the foreign combined with the familiar,” says the Swiss artist Caro Niederer, whose intimate paintings, mining the depths of sense memory and based upon images from her travels and her daily life, have long had a cult following in Europe. This week, a solo show opening at Hauser & Wirth in New York introduces her work to an American audience. Niederer, 49, grew up in Zurich and turned to art during the student riots of the early 1980s when “anything seemed possible,” she said on the phone from that city. Later, she spent time in Cairo on a grant, and began collecting postcards, which she transformed, via painting, into exquisite, small distillations of faraway places. She also created shimmering silk carpets derived from her paintings, and photographed them both hanging in collectors’ homes—a cool sociological study that reunites the scattered members of her tribe of works. The eighteen luminous paintings shown at Hauser & Wirth (alongside a group of earlier pieces, some derived from postcards of Indian miniatures of the Kama Sutra) are the fruit of two years’ labor recording daily life with her two children, still lifes in her apartment, and the commute to her Zurich studio. (She separated from the children’s father, Swiss artist David Weiss—one-half of the art-world duo Fischli/Weiss—six years ago; he died in April.) After making videos, photographs, and carpets, Niederer says it was a thrill to return to the medium that was her first love. “With painting,” she explains, “there is a search for something unconscious. It’s an alternative to rational language. That’s what I wanted to do, and I want to go on with that.”“Caro Niederer. Paintings” opens June 27 and is on view through July 27 at Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York; hauserwirth.com
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