The Swiss born Artist Dominique Teufen has graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam in 2002. Since obtaining her BA in fine Arts/Sculpture Department, she lived and worked in various cities though as Amsterdam, Melbourne, Zürich and London. Recently she returned back to Amsterdam, where she now lives and works.
“To observe the things people do around me is as if I am a spectator of a very experimental and exotically strange theatre play. In these moments I am becoming part of a weird and colourful, but mostly incomprehensible story. Nevertheless, it opens up my imagination, it inspires me and it gives me the freedom to experiment with the ingredients until I have cooked up a surprising and exiting new dish.
The reference I take starts with myself, how I understand daily life and how I question it. I enjoy discovering a new imaginary by giving a twist to locked up meanings and then to rethink the embedded purpose.In her drawings, figures hang on hooks, chains or ropes and have holes where flowers or other things grow or come out. Sometimes the figures are controlled by machines and/or are connected to different kinds of objects. In other cases they have stairs, water or other figures inside them. They run, fly or just stand around. Mainly they are not wearing clothes, and with their genitals not exposed, their gender is not suggested. The lines are not limited to the papers size and therefore are indicating the possibility of a place where they could exist outside the paper border.
The figure stand as individuals, connected with their social surroundings, in the center of their own narrative. Dominique sees the figures more as visualized human mind set, than an actual human body performing an act. This characterizing of people is based on the world she sees and reads about every day. In her latest works she has developed sculptures and installations, which are referring to the drawings through using the requisites from the personal theater plays she observes.It can be argued, that there is something so abnormally normal that it becomes surreal. It seems that she visualizes the remains of moments that have just existed in her imagination and who are suggesting a new and different narrative structure through often encountered and experienced objects. New compositions and structures are created and without wanting to be explained, left to the spectator’s observation."
