Sophie Thun: Wet Rooms

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (MCBA), is pleased to present Sophie Thun’s solo exhibition Wet Rooms, commissioned for its Project Space.

Playing with the concepts of scale and trompe l’œil, the vast photo installations created by Sophie Thun take the exhibition space as their starting point. The artist renders modes of production visible through a complex process of layering that questions any fixed notion of time and space.

Wet Rooms refers to the darkroom where Thun develops her analog photographs. An intimate space marked by the presence of chemical baths essential to revealing the image, it is also a space of solitude and silence in which the artist reconstructs her vision of the world, notably through the motif of the window. Through a subtle collage technique that blends photograms and large-format prints, she overlays her own image onto the places where she has lived, worked, and exhibited, creating an archive that is continuously evolving.

When working on her large-format photographs, the artist uses magnets to hold the paper against the metal wall in the darkroom. This surface frequently appears in her images, but for the first time, it is physically displayed in the exhibition, where Thun has relocated the metal panels that once served as the projection wall in the Berlin lab where she created her large-format color prints. Now dismantled due to a lack of economic opportunities, the wall exists solely as a relic part of the material history of art. It symbolizes the interdependent relationships that marked the end of a technique.

By exploring the question of self-representation, Thun becomes both the creator of the image and the subject on display, the author and the object. In doing so, she disrupts the power dynamics inherent in the strategies of representation that have long shaped the history of the female nude and pornography. However, this assertion is also paired with a form of vanishing. Her body, fragmented, multiplied, and rearranged, exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

The artist also engages her own image in dialogue with the more or less explicit presence of figures who have shaped her aesthetic thinking. From these encounters, she creates images rich with ambivalence, lying somewhere between documentation and homage, such as her reproduction of Louise Breslau’s La Vie Pensive (1908). In this painting, part of the MCBA collection, the German-born Swiss artist depicts herself in an interior scene with her partner. Appropriated by Thun, the image incorporates the genealogy of her own emancipation. Thus, the exhibition becomes a space where fragments of a multifaceted and elusive identity coexist, providing the foundation for an autofictional narrative.

Curated by Pierre-Henri Foulon, Curator of contemporary art, MCBA

Biography
Sophie Thun (*1985) lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. She grew up in Warsaw, studied graphic arts in Cracow, and painting and photography at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions include Zwischen Licht und Wand, Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2024); Leaking Times, Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2023); Trails and Tributes, Kunstverein Hildesheim (2022); I don’t Remember a Thing. Entering the Elusive Estate of ZDZ* Sophie Thun and the archive of Zenta Dzividzinksa, at the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2021); and Stolberggasse, Secession, Vienna. In 2024, Thun was awarded the Otto Breicha Prize for photography. She is currently the interim professor for photography at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Düsseldorf.

Publication
Pierre-Henri Foulon (ed.) Sophie Thun. Wet Rooms with a text by Hélène Giannecchini (French/English), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 2025 (coll. Espace Projet n°6)
CHF 8 at the MCBA Book and Gift shop: shop.mcba@plateforme10.ch