At Frieze London 2023, Sweetwater presents a series of new mixed-media works by Hanna Stiegeler, whose practice examines consumerism and commercialism through photography and mixed-media printing. In the late 19th century, Degas and Pissarro began working on small canvases shaped for use as fans, painting scenes of daily life as if seen through a lunular peephole. These works were a reflection of a broad obsession with hand-painted fans imported from east Asia to France, so popular that they had also inspired a local industry of less-expensive printed fans.

Stiegeler’s series, titled Arcaden, takes its main compositional element, the fan shape, from an 1870s Pissarro sketch, yet replaces the scenes of impressionists’ daily lives with printed photographs of merchandise and branding in shopping malls, often named “Arcaden” in Germany. The works’ central cut-out is created through layering, their base image obscured either by another screen print or laser print, a separate image on printed fabric, or hand-painted gesso. Modern commercialism takes center stage in Stiegeler’s works, replacing the idyllic scenes of nature and entertainment painted on fans by the impressionists. The shopping mall here is cast not only as a venue for commerce, but a venue designed such that commerce is eminently conspicuous, emblematic of a wider consumeristic narrative. In the 19th century, the fans themselves were symbols of trade and commerce at the outset of globalization, the effects of which are manifest in the images that appear in Stiegeler’s works nearly 150 years later.