Matt Saunders | Ratlos / Indomitable

In our Copenhagen Showroom, we present a selection of large-scale etchings from Matt Saunders’ series Ratlos /Indomitable I-V, 2017.

Matt Saunders works with portraits of the fictional movie character Leni Peickert, who appears in two films by German director Alexander Kluge. The character offers a reflection on a historical moment of feminism. Saunders uses a visual doubling, a hand-drawn overlapping of frames rendered in soap ground, to visualize the character’s inner state. The instability of the ground and time-based action of the acid led to images that are, in one-way, stable combinations of multiple frames and in another way irreconcilable, suspended in flux.

After concluding the five large-scale etchings of the Ratlos/Indomitable I-V (2017) series, Matt Saunders was so intrigued by the backs of the printing plate that he and Niels Borch Jensen decided to print and publish them. The marks and scratches bear witness to the printmaking process and show how the developing time in acid brings forth the indentations. Both Ratlos/Indomitable and Back (Ratlos/Indomitable) were part of Matt Saunders’ 2017 solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where the respective counterparts from the two series were presented on both sides of a freestanding wall.