ZURICH.- With Bouquets, Kunsthalle Zürich presents the first institutional solo exhibition by Avignon-based artist and experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder. Highlighting Lowder's ongoing series Bouquets, which began over three decades ago, the exhibition provides an insight into the artist's unique working method, which addresses issues of sustainability and visual perception in works made on 16mm film. For the first time ever, an exhibition shows all Bouquets works together, presenting them in dialogue with a selection of their visual transcriptions – drawings by the artist that serve as a point of orientation within her complex frame-by-frame technique.

Born in 1941 in Lima, Peru, Lowder studied painting and sculpture in her native city and from 1960 onwards continued her studies at Regent Street Polytechnic and Chelsea School of Art in London. In parallel, between 1964 and 1972, she worked as an editor in the film and television industry (including the BBC), where she first came into direct contact with the medium of film and edited documentaries and advertising films. It was only after she moved to her adopted home of Avignon, France, in 1972 that the artist began to explore film as her means of artistic expression. She developed a labour-intensive frame-by-frame technique that she continued to elaborate and perfect over decades. Lowder works with a 16mm Bolex camera that enables her to approach each frame individually – not needing to conform to the regime of the traditional film sequence. By skipping individual frames and not exposing them during filming, then rewinding the film and running it through the camera again to record on these gaps, Lowder weaves complex compositions without any post-production. In these films, colours and textures, perspectives, times and places are both layered and interlocking. The artist often focuses her lens on everyday scenes or the flora and fauna of selected locations (such as gardens or organic farms) that she finds in her immediate surroundings in the south of France, as well as in Italy or Switzerland.

Lowder's Bouquets, the first of which she completed in 1994, and which remain her most acclaimed films, are the focus of the Kunsthalle Zürich exhibition. Originally conceived in order to avoid waste and, indeed, recycle the short ends of film reels, the series now consists of forty silent, one-minute films, which are bundled into a total of four ‘bouquets of images’. This ongoing study in composition and perception is displayed at Kunsthalle Zürich across ten large-format projections. Captured with a 16mm Bolex camera, the single-frame shots of flowers, rivers, forests and animals are assembled according to the artist’s logic and set in motion to her own rhythm. While individual sequences last no more than sixty seconds each, the production process of each work extends over hours, days or even weeks, frequently capturing a long passage of time and seasons in the process. In the tradition of (post-) Impressionist painters such as Morisot, Cézanne and van Gogh, Lowder works en plein air, using her camera instead of a brush and canvas to translate time and movement into dense visual compositions. Her way of engaging with human perception both relies on and challenges how we process visual information – an orchestrated sequence of images can yield an illusion of movement, can lead to their conflation or merging or prompt our brain to involuntarily create a logical relation between them.

Lowder developed a rigorous notation system which structures her works and allows viewers an insight into her filmic practice. Presented in display cases alongside Bouquets, the selection of transcriptions of some of her Bouquets feature detailed drawings in coloured pencil on graph paper. Each second has been meticulously recorded by the artist, arranged in segments of its 24 frames, with three lines per frame. While Lowder's notebooks serve as a valuable tool for analysing her working process, they are also works of art in their own right – scores and poetic codes that, like Lowder's films, continuously enter ‘into dialogue with reality’ and reveal a structure that the eye usually can’t see.

Bouquets however not only testifies to Lowder's lasting interest in the material qualities of her media, but to her distinct understanding of filmmaking as an ecological practice. Nature in her films features as more than just a given ‘outdoors’ or a projection of her own impressions. Rather, her films are firmly anchored in a natural space – one that provides not just subjects or protagonists, but is also always an integral part of the production process and draws in the artist herself. Her own theory of ecology resurfaces repeatedly: in the resource-conscious production practice which recycles rather than generates waste, as well as in her engagement with organic agriculture. Her regular visits to organic farms not only provide material for her work but are also part of her political engagement with alternative, sustainable ways of living – and filmmaking.

Curated by Fanny Hauser with an exhibition display designed by Studio Manuel Raeder.