Back to overview

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.

Matt Saunders, Two Losses, Two Lovers, Two Bathers, 2019

Learn more about Matt Saunders