Featured artwork of the week:  Sophie Bouvier Ausländer's Avalanche

Avalanche, gouache on waxed map, 32 x 28 cm, 2018

A staggering bang, shaking you to the core, followed by eerie silence. Within seconds the masses are set into motion. With incredible speed and impetuous force. Burying everything under a layer of snow. A spectacle of outstanding beauty and cruelty. Sophie Bouvier Ausländer’s point of departure for her artistic practice is nothing less than our planet, which can be considered as the sculpture par excellence. Her small and large-scale waxed maps from the Avalanche series are covered with paint and then scratched and scribbled into and sometimes re-covered with paint. The “avalanche”, the covering in colour, erases the map’s territories and borders, detaches it from its function and alienates it from the reality of our planet. Bouvier Ausländer then reverses course and starts to dig out the signs from under the cover. She retakes control of the lost ground, searching through the surface and furrowing the crust. She brings to light fragments of the vanished terrain in an attempt to reconstruct an extinguished world. Yet Bouvier Ausländer also brings to light a new vision, a maybe bruised but modified and freshly charged version of the earth - a version that we are currently beginning to experience, one that will accompany us for times to come. (Text in parts by Marie Fabienne Aimon)

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art 11 Church Street London NW8 8EE, UK T +44 (0)20 7724 5548 info@patrickheide.com www.patrickheide.com #patrickhiedgallery@fineartmagazine