BIOGRAPHY

Cooper Gorfer comprises the artists Sarah Cooper (US, SE, 1974) and Nina Gorfer (AT, 1979). Their work centers around themes of illusion, memory and dislocation, illustrating the malleability of identity through layered pictorial collages of the female experience.

The artist duo is known for their distinct hybrid portraits of women and immersive worlds with socio-political undertones. With a point of departure in photography, their work ranges from physically layered collages with painted and embroidered materials, to photographs of disassembled images in different states of ephemeral montage. The complexities of their subjects are reflected in the process and the fragmentation of the artwork’s surfaces.

Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer reimagine the tradition of portraiture by visually examining and deconstructing the narrative layers of those they portray. As much audience as creators, the artists’ own experiences are intertwined with that of the protagonist, resulting in images in which several epochs are simultaneously present. Like art history’s Mannerists and Surrealists, Cooper Gorfer strain observable reality through a filter of memories, moods and wounds.

The artists’ delicate and sophisticated layering of image and texture contributes to the surreal visual tales that appear throughout their complex compositions and creates a world where anything seems possible. Sections of the figures or image may be cut away revealing a new level below, a portal into an adjacent space or a door leading to a new sphere of metaphorical possibility. At other moments architectural and abstracted geometric elements are placed on top of the subject, bending and morphing to create new and unexpected garments, gestures and surreal associations. This playful manipulation of image is part of the formal construction of each image but also contributes to the feeling that each figure could be overcome by their own tableau at any moment. With the use of naïve cuts and collage elements, Cooper and Gorfer construct various layers of physicality within each work, acting like the many layers of backdrops on a theatre stage. This visual dance between abstraction and figuration, and Cooper & Gorfer’s continued mastery of space and perspective transforms a seemingly surreal world into something utterly believable. Caught in a constant maze of surfaces and projected realities, each girl’s environment may be built, torn down and rebuilt differently, but it is inherently constructed, subjective and therefore a theatrical image of reality, never reality itself.

Sarah Cooper (b.1974, US) and Nina Gorfer (b.1979, Austria) have been collaborating since 2006 and work between Gothenburg, Sweden and Berlin, Germany. Selected recent exhibitions include When We Are Giant. Larsen Warner, Sweden (2022); The Weather Diaries, Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, Estonia (2020); Interruptions and The Weather Diaries, Rosphoto, St Petersburg, Russia (2018); Interruptions, Árran, Lulesamisk Senter, Drag, Norway (2018); A Queen Within, NOMA New Orleans Museum of Art, USA (2018); I Know Not These My Hands/Interruptions, Strandverket Konsthall, Marstrand, Sweden (2018); The Weather Diaries, American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis, USA (2017); I Know Not These My Hands, Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden (2017); The Weather Diaries, Nordic Heritage Museum, Seattle, USA, Danish Cultural Center, Beijing, China (2016); The Weather Diaries, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, Denmark (2014). In 2018, Cooper & Gorfer were the winners of the prestigious German Photo Book award for their monograph I Know Not These My Hands.

“We have always felt that our artworks are on the edge of photography and, as a result, have never thought of ourselves as photographers in the traditional sense of the word. Our work is more about enabling the image that we are striving to create to come forward, and we use any means to achieve that”

when we are giant, 2022

I Know Not These My Hands / The Weather

Diaries, 2014

Utopia or the mistake of the intellect, 2018

UNDER NOMADIC SURFACES, 2010