Silver Back & Back Rock, 2012

A black and white photograph and a corresponding papier-mâché sculpture, shown in the two solo shows The Imagines at Galerie Metro (Berlin, April-May 2012 DE) and Objets Reposés at M Museum (Leuven, June-September 2012 BE)

Elements:

Silver Back: silver gelatine print, mounted and framed ( 105cm x 103,5cm)

Back Rock: papier-mâché sculpture with silver gelatine prints (110cm x ca. 80cm)

Silver Back is the portrait of a sitting gorilla, who abandons the viewer and presents his broad back. Next to it is an equally massive sculpture made of white papier mâché, entitled Back Rock, that in its abstract form, however, appears facing the portrait of the gorilla as the three-dimensional pendant of its back.
Silver Back was the first image of a male Gorilla in the Stuttgart Zoo. It lead to
various projects related to apes and their representation over the years, one of them being the artist book Puzzle Box.
Applying a phenomenological approach to her own work Lechleitner aimed to transform the viewer's sensation of a photograph into a three-dimensional object- in this case the papier-mâché object Back Rock.