Matt Saunders | Etchings
Matt Saunders has been working on an ongoing series of landscape etchings since 2015. Often completed in parallel to his other collaborations with BORCH Editions, the series will ultimately comprise six etchings (in an allusion to Wallace Steven’s poem Six Significant Landscapes). Drawn from film stills, each of Saunders‘ landscapes is at once an empty scene open to projection and an emblem of the emotive and narrative currents swirling off camera. Saunders has spoken of these works as „grasping for the subconsciousness“ of the film.
Zen Valley, the fourth of these etchings, depicts a scene from King Hu’s 1971 film Touch of Zen. It is the fourth print in the series, which already includes Swamp, Landscape II (Dark Forest), and Landscape III (Bright Forest), for which Saunders used imagery from two German films: Kuhle Wampe and Menschen am Sonntag.
Matt Saunders’ suite of three new etchings ruminates on the complex nature of intimate relationships, eroticism and loss. He has employed the principle of doubling in previous print projects as a way to visualize double consciousness and split personality, and returns to it here in one of his first print projects in color. The new prints are executed from two plates and printed in two colors that enter into a kind of equilibrium, combining and separating at the same time. Two Lovers is a double portrait of one person. Two Bathers combines two women from different centuries (Marthe de Méligny and actress Jane Birkin). Two Losses is based on pictures by the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase of two of his intimate partners.
Matt Saunders, born 1975 in Tacoma, Washington, lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts and Berlin, Germany.

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Featured editions
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Matt Saunders
Landscape III (Bright Forest), 2015From the portfolio Landscape I – VIUnavailable as single print -
Matt Saunders
Landscape II (Dark Forest), 2015From the portfolio Landscape I – VI€872 -
Matt Saunders
Landscape I (Swamp), 2015From the portfolio Landscape I – VI€872 -
Matt Saunders
Landscape IV (Zen Valley), 2019From the portfolio Landscape I – VI€872