User:Lieve Prins/sandbox

Lieve Prins (Lichtervelde Belgie, 1948) is a Dutch artist internationally considered as one of the most representative artists of Copy Art and its evolution through Scan Art. Since the 70s she has been working with photocopy machines and scanners, writing part of the roots of the Historical Media Art.

Biography Lieve Prins is one of the most important artists of the so-called Third Generation of Copy Art, distinguishable with her artworks in large formats created from an amalgam of bodies and symbolic elements that have been placed on the glass of the machine materializing an almost theatrical scenography.

Lieve Prins completed the Academy of Fine Arts in Breda (Holland) and took courses on audio and visual communication at the Film Academie of Amsterdam. She is internationally considered as an important and representative artist of Copy Art, even though her artworks have been wrongly considered as a new type of photography by many. It was thanks to her training related to audiovisual communication and the unexpected encounter with the photocopy machine, which made her began to be dedicated to art in a full way. She discovered the photocopy machine, which was described by her as a "a magic box", "a time machine", "an instant photo-studio", "a miniature theater" and his partner in art, in a supermarket in 1982. This technology involved for different artists a genuine revolution at the artistic level, especially because of its instantaneity and multiplicity, both in functional process and in materialization.

She began making portraits to the children and, this way, she could realize how placing their small faces on the glass of the photocopy machine, the result emerged directly printed on paper. This simple fact made her feel very attracted by the instantaneity, the instantaneous action-reaction that gave rise to a process that could be called a loop, almost addictive for her.

The human figure, the face and all body movements and facial expressions have always been the focus of this artist. Her artworks in color present bodies as if they were objects, sometimes packaged, as in the series To be wrapped (1982), crushed against glass or emerging from compact colored backgrounds. In these artworks, Lieve Prins wrapped various objects with plastic as if they were gifts and placed them on the surface of the machine to register them, making reference to the subject of the move. Her artworks are especially characterized by the aesthetics of the fragments, large compositions consummated by the combination of several elements due to the size limitations of the photocopy machine. She creates in the private studio or, on the contrary, especially in the works made in the mid-eighties, were considered performance on the machine and executed in front of the public, in the galleries themselves, as if it were attending to a theatrical performance in an art space

In 1983 she created the series Black and White in Color, in which she contrasted the female body of a teenager with the body and skin of a colour man. The images show varied attitudes, from the most violent in which color hands take the breast of the girl, to others in which both faces appear playing or placed in a very compositional way, and accompanied by the use of different saturated colors that characterized the first works of Prins. In this series, the artist has not only contrasted different human races, but all the stereotypes that society has towards cultural differences, ages, personal relationships and sexuality, an element that will always be present in her works

From that period, the artist began to possess a strong consciousness of the whole in her works, not just to repeat the vertical formats, but rather to make the work meaningful as a whole. His compositions are closer to the great compositions and realizations of Alcalacanales artistic group, but in this Spanish group the unions of the different formats are imperceptible.In the case of Lieve Prins, the artist does not conceal the collage of fragments, but integrates it into her composition. This overall vision appears and is amplified with the advent of digital, launching into the creation of a series of panels of high classicist content, such as The Oystereaters (1990).

It was in 2001, in the evolution of her work towards the new digital conquests, when she travelled to Japan to work with Canon company and carry out the Idols project on Japanese culture, and travelled to Tokyo for that purpose. There she employed the Bubble Jet technology in some works where she stopped being able to use his complementary illuminations, making the whole process of creating the pieces by printing centimetre by centimetre with that large format color machine.

Lieve Prins continues today using the digital photocopier and scanner with which she registers reality and later composes on the computer. The germination of this fruitful artistic production, in its digital development, place artistic practices with the photocopy machine as potential roots as Historical Media Art; or they would be predecessors, from the digital xerography, of what would be the future of images through the software of image retouching, such as Photoshop, leading to the development of other artistic fields, such as Digital Graphics.

Prins, Lieve (2016) "Horizontal Theatre". A: Escribano, Beatriz (2016). Processes: The Artist and the Machine. Reflections on the historical Media Art. Cuenca: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Castile-La Mancha. pp. 279-283.

(own words by the artist)

How many of us suspected that this bulky, frustrating to operate and frankly dull exterior have disguised a machine with a soul that yearns to sing? Touch – a perfect encapsulation of the physicality of her work - shows that sing it does in the service of Prins’ earthy, cornucopian imagination. Prins prefers the copier and scanner medium to photography. "[In photography], everything is reduced to a negative; you lose the sense of the real size of the subject. With life-scanning, all attention has to be focused on one body part, then you build up a fantasy image with these parts." It's dreamy, it's erotic -- but fresh squid on a warm scanner or photocopier? "Yes -- they stank!" Prins says. But mess and discomfort go with the medium. "I see my work as 'nice torture.' It's hot, dirty work; I slosh water around and wrap things in plastic. Sometimes I have to make ten copies or scans before I get the right image; my [human] models are lying on their backs on a warm glass plate, twisting into strange positions. But it's also rewarding for us -- with anything hard, such as giving birth, one's love for the result is intensified. "One day I saw my daughter's hand resting on a photocopier in a department store and -- bingo! I marched the kids down to the store with a pocket full of change and just plunked them down on the copier. I was immediately engrossed by the textures of clothes and skin that came out, and also I found something magical about the directness of the copier -- no negatives, no wait. "Photocopiers and scanners are especially spontaneous, because of the specific need for speed in a contemporary machine. I find this reflects the rapidity of our age and culture. Also, the sense of direct contact with the subject is so special - I don't think business peaples realizes how beautiful its machine is. It provides a great opportunity to say what I want about things that are important to me: my children, love, family life - everything that is absent from business and technology." Her technical vocabulary, she points out, was discovered through understanding her mistakes in a direct, kinesthetic way. "Unlike photography, where if you take a photo you must wait at least an hour for prints, you can correct your mistakes immediately. This action-reaction loop is addictive."

Escribano, Beatriz (2017). Copy Art Histories: The emergence of the photocopy machine in the 20th century art and its role as Historical Media Art. Tendencies and thematic cartography of Copy Art. Doctoral Thesis. Director: José Ramón Alcalá. Cuenca: University of Castile-La Mancha. Prins, Lieve (2016) "Horizontal Theatre". A: Escribano, Beatriz (2016). Processes: The Artist and the Machine. Reflections on the historical Media Art. Cuenca: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Castile-La Mancha. pp. 279-283.