Marcie Kaufman

Region: Pacific Coast

In my work, perspectives converge, media collide, and boundaries break. I paint on photographs and link paintings with digital prints in order to explore the space between the mechanical and the handmade. I use images of landscape, its structures and maps, as a basis for abstraction and a point of connection with the human body. I transform anatomical, topographical, and mechanical systems and create relationships with art historical precedents.

For the Becher Series, featured here, I digitally manipulated reproductions of Hilla and Bernd Becher’s photographs of European blast furnace heads (1970s) and created negative images that serve as the star ting point to my abstract painting. By applying paint directly on top of ink jet prints, I reveal and conceal the source imagery and return the sites to painting and drawing—Bernd Becher’s original recording process. The painting redefines the obsolete and monumental industrial sites as optimistic and personal.