In her photographic as well as installatory scenarios, Dutch artist Peggy Franck(*1978) creates an exciting dialogue by juxtaposing image and space as interior and exterior worlds. Created merely for photography, the arrangements in the photographic images appear as abstract compositions on the one hand and a source of countless stories on the other.
Her photographs change between expanded surface and fictitious space and are linked with installations which extend this surface into real space. Some photographs show pictorial compositions, while others like »Waiting for the Quiet Moment to Come (1+2)« transform into sculptures. The photographs, on the other hand, are juxtaposed with installations, which appear painterly, as well as with wall paintings.
Peggy Franck’s scenarios consist of everyday objects and materials such as paper, wood, Plexiglas®, and adhesive tape which she stages with illusionist techniques used in painting, film and sculpture. Her works show precise compositions, a play with abstract forms and colors, alluding to art and photo historical references. In her works the exuberant and emotional imagery of the Baroque unfolds as well as Modernism with its exact geometric forms. The photographic scenarios are precise but appear, at the same time, intuitive, representing a playful lightness. Mostly arranged in the artist’s studio, they are either devoid of people or show the artist amidst her scenarios that are reminiscent of stage sets or performances. Appearing in various roles, she creates in her studio her cosmos that is always drawing on itself, recreating itself anew. This system of references continues in the installations in which the viewer can recognize related elements from recent or older photographic works or installations. Her works appear like psychographs, imbued with meaningful objects, such as broken mirrors, chairs, display dummies etc. Peggy Franck’s studio stands for a complex interior world into which she grants us insight, without becoming concrete.
For Peggy Franck the photographic and installation compositions are the traces of her thoughts and memories. Dramatic lighting and the resulting play of light and shadow, as seen in her work »Solo flight«, underline the artist’s enigmatic pictorial worlds as much as do her profound titles. Peggy Franck is interested in the tension between the seemingly real world and the interior image world, the interplay of different realities between reality and image world, presence and absence, part and entirety, connecting a colorfully glittering, sensuous world with a transience that is exemplified through vanitas motifs like the mirror or the skull in the form of a display head.
In Peggy Franck’s work various materials and opposites such as chaos and order, precision and emotion, or energy imbued gestures in a still life melt into a new unity. Even the exhibition’s title »at home a stranger« refers to this linking of opposites, to the unfamiliar in the familiar.

Peggy Franck studied at the academy in s-Hertogenbosch and was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2005 and 2006. In recent years, her works were presented in numerous group and solo exhibitions, for instance at Klerkx in Milan, COALmine in Winterthur, X-Initiative in New York a.o. This year she transformed a Wilhelminian style villa in Münster for her solo exhibition »In Rocking Motion« at the Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster into a Baroque gesamtkunstwerk.

Translated by Uta Hoffmann