Stoneage Campfire is a Stone Age campfire—or communal stone time? In Alexandra Leykauf’s works, the gaze takes on a central role as a communicative and deceptive element. She plays with the desire for truth and recognition, with the assumed indexicality of photography. The various photographic and three-dimensional processes gradually condense into analog alienations and rearrangements, so that multiple perspectives collapse into one another.
For her edition, Leykauf arranged stones on black paper and sprayed them with white chalk spray, whose many small pigment dots resemble a printing grid. The scene was then photographed in black and white and printed on red neon paper. Background and foreground are reversed as soon as the black background is applied to the colorful paper and the previously foregrounded chalk spray only appears as an absence.
As in the exhibition What We Do in the Shadows, in which her works referred to pareidolia—the hallucination of faces in the environment—Alexandra Leykauf has also imagined personified objects in this work: beings assembled around a fire or perhaps being illuminated from above.
The occasion for this gathering is left to our imagination. In the end, the negative inversion of Stoneage Campfire creates an image of something that didn’t exist before.
In 2015, Alexandra Leykauf made an annual edition for GAK. Sunset Harbor at Rio (Martin Johnson Heade) on my desk, 2015 is also available.
Alexandra Leykauf (*1976), lives in Berlin. Studied at the academies in Nuremberg and Amsterdam and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten. Solo and group exhibitions (selection): 2022 GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, 2021 Kunstverein Springhornhof, Kunstverein Siegen, 2020 Villa du Parc, Annemasse (FR), KM Berlin, 2019 Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Galerie Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen (DK), 2018 Focal Point Gallery, Southend (GB), 2016 Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles (FR), 2015 GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen. Works in collections including Centre Pompidou (FR), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (FR), Royal Dutch KPN Collection (NL).
Edition 2022
Alexandra Leykauf
Stoneage Campfire
2022
b/w print on neon red paper (80g)
59,4 x 84,1 cm (A1)
edition: 30 (+ 8 AP), sign., num.
150 Euro each incl. 19 % VAT
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