Dominique Auerbacher

Dominique Auerbacher is a French artist born in 1955, who lives in Paris and Berlin. After completing her master’s degree in clinical psychology, she exhibited her photographs of Paris in 1982 at the MAM / ARC in Paris as part of the Photographie France Aujourdʼhui exhibition, as well as in 1983, as the winner of the City of Paris Prize, when she exhibited her photographs of East Berlin.

Hired by the DATAR Photographic Mission, she photographed the urban landscape in 1985 and developed the concepts of commonplace and non-places. Since 1990, her photographic series and protean installations brought into question the notions of territory, private and public, and the representation of everyday life in sales catalogues such as Ikea. Since 2009, she has been particularly interested in collective and anonymous graffiti and collages. Her works have been exhibited at the Schirn Kunsthalle and the Kunstverein in Frankfurt, the MAXXI in Rome, and the MEP in Paris. Since 2000, she has been an art professor at the HEAR in Strasbourg.

SCRATCHES, made in Berlin from 2008 to 2011, projects “an artist’s perspective on creation, the gaze
and the political dimensions of art… Dominique Auerbacher has managed to catch the wildness of an
ephemeral urban underground culture. Her procedure is less documentary than artistic. What she sees in
the unsophisticated formal energy of “scratches” are visual echoes of the long history of graffiti,
handwritten inscriptions typical of popular culture, a combination of writing and drawing, and even of Action
Painting. In these “scratches” she also hears the squeal of glass being scratched as the forms emerge and
the dull roar of the voiceless acquiring a visibility that is as momentary as it is deafening”. (André Rouillé,
“Scratches, or the clamour of the voiceless”, paris-art.com, editorial no. 386)

(Source : André Rouillé, éditorial N° 386 de paris-art.com.)

EXIT THROUGH THE PHONE BOOTH / ETCHES, made in Paris from 2011 to 2014, shows the last
existing phone booths – tiny glass heterotopias on whose transparent surfaces, covered in etched tags, bits
of sticky tape, torn remnants of posters, etc., the public and private spheres are reflected and merge.
Just like SCRATCHES, phone booths have all but disappeared from our urban landscapes
The title EXIT THROUGH THE PHONE BOOTH evokes more particularly the sculptural graffiti of Banksy’s
“London Phone Booth” in which, not without a touch of irony, the artist transforms an obsolete object – the
phone booth – into a work of art.