Nadia Lichtig
Portrait of Nadia Lichtig
Kerr, Sunny (ed.), Drift: Art & Dark Matter, K-Verlag, Berlin, 2023
→Juler, Edward et Robinson, Alistair (ed.), Post-Specimen Encounters Between Art, Science and Curating, Bristol, Intellect Books, 2020
→Seyfarth, Ludwig (ed.), Pictures of Nothing, Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld, Kerber Verlag, 2014
French-German multidisciplinary artist.
Nadia Lichtig was born in Germany to a family from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, two countries that no longer exist. Her vision of a world formed from remembered languages, absences, forgotten heritages and reinterpretations springs from these beginnings. N. Lichtig graduated in 2001 from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, and began developing a body of work in motion, alive and existing in multiple forms, visual, vocal and musical. As her artistic practice evolved, so too did her musical explorations: as part of the group EchoparK, on the project Falseparklocation, and with several solo projects under pseudonyms such as Nanana and Ghosttrap. Whether in the form of paintings, installations, sound pieces or song lyrics, the works involve subtle yet complex processes of translation and transposition, and the construction of spaces of sensorial resonance to be perceived and “read” on different levels.
N. Lichtig’s Pictures of Nothing series (2012-ongoing), displayed as part of the exhibition Catching the Light at Dusseldorf’s KAI10 in 2018, recalls the light-infused skies of J. M. W.Turner (1775-1851) or the later works of Claude Monet (1840-1926). The subjects seem diluted to the point of nothingness, ‘pictures of nothing’. Using a sort of graphic notation, the artist meticulously layers brushstrokes rather than representing physical objects. The paintings are visual transpositions of sung words, themselves lifted from letters sent to the artist and her family. The image’s space is not only visual, but sings with sound.
We can see the same effect in the artist’s Mille temps (A Thousand Times, 2012), a permanent work installed in a secondary school in Sérignan, Hérault. Though the work uses light during the day to make small moving rainbows appear and disappear, and wind at night to trigger luminous apparitions, it does not present a classically visual conception of space. Rather, the work seems to render visible a radar-like way of orienting oneself in space. Signals are emitted from the space and move across it, constantly forming and reforming relationships with their surroundings. That what we are seeing is derived not only from the visual but also the acoustic and tactile qualities of the environment perhaps confuses our conventional conceptions of materiality, evoking “states of matter” rather than matter itself.
The series Blank Spots (2017-ongoing) also exists in multiple states. First presented as a live performance in 2019 at the Schwankhalle in Bremen, the piece, comprising rubbings made in places of historical significance alongside corresponding score drawings, later became an immersive sound and light sculpture. The installation was shown as part of the Drift: Art and Dark Matter exhibition cycle in Canada between 2020 and 2022, visiting among others Vancouver’s Belkin Art Gallery in 2022. This time, the work was transformed once again when, over the course of an afternoon’s collaboration with the University of British Columbia’s School of Music, the exhibition space became the site of an ephemeral choral interpretation performed by six singers.
A biography produced as part of the +1 programme.
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2024
