ALIKI BRAINE

15.09 — 28.10.2011

WILFUL DAMAGE

Using photography as a way of harnessing and containing expansive images of landscape, Aliki Braine’s work is concerned with showing the photograph as an object. She photographs using medium format cameras and then systematically damages or obliterates the negative, thus dramatically altering the original image. In an attempt to break the illusion of photography, Braine re-works the negatives by hole punching and drawing on them with black ink or by obliterating them with circular stickers. Through these processes of elimination Braine is also re-investing the image with the act of looking while at the same time hiding or destroying the image. As such, by drawing the viewer’s attention to the surface of the photograph she pushes photography towards abstraction.

Wilful Damage will present works made over the last eight years and reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in historical practices of landscape painting, including the works of 18th century draughtsman Alexander Cozens and 17th century painter Goffredo Wals.

Aliki Braine was born in Paris in 1976 and grew up in Greece, Algeria, Holland, Germany and France. She studied Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University and the Slade School of Fine Art, London along with completing a Masters degree in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, London. She has exhibited in London, Paris, Lisbon and Madrid. Braine teaches at the Slade Summer School and Serpentine Gallery and gives public lectures for the National Gallery.