Born in 1964 in Winterthur, Switzerland. Died in 2012 in Binningen, Switzerland.
Leta Peer’s early work groups show her examination of images of women, while her later works focused on the mountains of the Engadine. These, together with meadow landscapes, remain Peer’s exclusive motifs. She installs her small paintings, often with a fine sense of humour, as ensembles in surprising public spaces such as Grand Central Station in New York (GIFT, 1998-2000), and she also allows private rooms of acquaintances to become a borrowed home for her mountain paintings (Borrowed Places, 2001). While Peer initially photographed these temporary installations, from 2002 onwards she inserted her painted mountain landscapes, mounted in old gold frames, digitally into photographs of late medieval high altars (Devoted to a Landscape, 2002), a rococo palace undergoing restoration (To Inhabit a Place, 2005), or a bakery that was about to be demolished (Mirrors, 2007). Her medium- and large-format naturalistic mountain landscapes painted with a visible brushstroke often show more clouds and sky than peaks – trimmed from the lower edge of the picture – and reflect the appearance of the mountain in atmospheric space in an exciting way. With her photographic contextual inventions for these paintings, she expands their sphere of action and tests new perspectives on her painting.
Peer’s works are represented in international collections such as the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland; Kantonsmuseum Baselland, Switzerland; Hoffmann-La Roche Basel, Switzerland; Bank Julius Bär New York City, USA; Deste Foundation Athens, Greece.
