ANNE LOCH

We thank Mr. André Born, Estate of Anne Loch, for his kind support.

Provenance: Purchased in the 1980s directly from the artist by the present owner, since then private collection Germany.

“I often think that a psychiatrist would have many reasons as to why I live as I live. Why I live with this love, for example, I would love suffering, or any such thing.
I have been given so many explanations. But beyond analysis there is something else: these are moments of truth, and to feel them – only I can do that. And to come to a decision, only I can do that. “ (Diary, June 1990)

The Swiss resident Anne Loch polarised in her works as well as in her life, which was shaped by her frequent changes of location and self-imposed isolation. Ostensibly her choice of motifs are traditional. Mountain landscapes, cows, still lifes of flowers are more redolent of a bourgeois sitting room than of disengagement, demarcation, chasms. Yet, in her painting style this is precisely what emerges. Her rapid, expressive lines, the dark colour palette dominated by brown tones, and the stage-like light and dark contrasts reveal her artistic homeland.

A Masters pupil of Klaus Rinke at the Düsseldorf art academy in the 1970s, at the beginning of the 1980s she attached herself to the Rhineland art scene. In 1983 Monika Sprüth opened the first gallery for women in the Cologne old town and Anne Loch was one of the artists which the gallery represented, along with Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman. In subsequent years Loch enjoyed wonderful success with the Neue Wilden artists around Martin Kippenberger. In 1988, however, Anne Loch suddenly turned her back on the Rhineland art world and moved to Switzerland to delicate herself fully to her painting. She sought not the idyll as many of her fellow artists, who moved to the picturesque Hotel Waldhaus in Sils in the Engadine, but chose Thusis for working and living, a functional place of transit.

Loch painted landscapes long before she decided to move to the Alpine region. She did not strive for a mimetic reproduction of the landscape and nature but sought the feeling of longing and pain that comes with the contemplation of a landscape. In her depiction of an Alpine landscape with lake, the artist does not employ a banal realism, but skilfully alternates between familiarity and alienation, pure beauty and its abyss. In precisely this intermediate zone the pictures become uncomfortable, almost discomforting, and have a disturbing undertone. Besides the sheer size of the images, their physical force and presence, it is the gloomy colour which lends the works a somewhat uncanny quality. The individual pictorial elements, such as the dominant mountain lake or the cows with their strong long shadows, seem to be adrift from their surroundings as autonomous components in the composition. More or less animated, in these elements there are echoes of ETA Hoffmann’s figure of the Sandman. The uncanny in the Freudian sense is the familiar which becomes strange, something that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, as in the mountain landscape depicted here or the herd of cows (Lot 3469). In doing so, the artist expertly completes the break with the traditional genre, breaks down embedded visual conventions and creates space for a new perception.