untitled

gelatin silver print

signed and dated verso

Elfriede Mejchar's scissors expose and separate outlines from the surface until, for example, a hand can be moved and draws black traces across the décolleté. The act of detaching, tearing out, shifting or swapping disturbs the original perfection, a collision of different elements that until then were not part of a common unit takes place – as is characteristic of collage: a head floats disembodied in front of a black background, a leopard has sunk its paw into an eye, a mouth spits words, another swallows an eye. Man and woman meet, black and white. Faces deform into flat masks through whose openings the background penetrates, open and closed eyes alternate or are surmounted by a third super-eye, which acts less as a moral authority than as a demanding id. Once the eyes and mouth have finally left the face, they cavort in front of a wall, for example. "I build pictures on the wall from materials that are in the public domain, from what is on public display, but I expose the flawless beauty that is constantly held up to us as the ideal by cutting it up or covering it up. They are evil collages. Short-term, pleasurable interventions that are gone again after being photographed."¹ All of the approximately 300 collages are only laid down or loosely pinned together and are taken apart again after being photographed; individual elements such as a green snake or a hand with a gun remain in the repertoire, others are simply disposed of.
(Ruth Horak, "Vom Zusammenfall der Gegensätze in der Phantasie – Elfriede Mejchars Arbeiten aus dem Atelier", in: Elfriede Mejchar. Fotografie, Weitra 2014, p. 142ff)

1
Elfriede Mejchar in: Nora Schoeller, "21 Reportagen", with interviews by Ruth Horak, ed. by Alfred Fogarassy, Salzburg 2008, p. 125.