Durchleuchtet

Artpoint 222, Vienna, Austria 25 October until 27 November 2008

Margaret Oechsli goes on extraordinary journeys with her microscope. Peering at a smudge of a dried chemical, such as crystallized glutamic acid, she probes the refracted light looking for artistic inspiration. “I have no control over what I see in the microscope,” she says in a rich Polish accent. But what she finds and photographs is stunning. She has created more than 3,000 images, shimmering geometries and colourful landscapes that look more like paintings than photos.

Oechsli's abstract studies of microscopic chemical structures will be shown in a new exhibition called Durchleuchtet, starting this week at Artpoint 222 in Vienna. Each image explores a cancer drug — such as tamoxifen, oxaliplatin, herceptin and others — that Oechsli handles in her day job as a clinical research coordinator in the Heart and Lung Institute at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.

Oechsli's Untested Beliefs highlights the magnified fern-like branching of atropine, a muscle relaxant. Credit: M. OECHSLI

The medical theme complements the fund-raising goal of Durchleuchtet — which in German means both 'illuminated with light' and 'X-rayed'. Oechsli's photos will be auctioned alongside artistically rendered radiographs of Austrian athletes, and the proceeds will benefit the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

Although her background in science has honed her techniques, Oechsli is drawn to the kaleidoscopic images for their own sake. An art lover, her most powerful photographs evoke familiar styles from famous abstract painters. “It pops to my mind that this style or this composition or this colour looks like [Robert] Motherwell or [Joan] Miró”, she says. Some resemble still-life pictures — in Dance Double, magnified l-isoleucine morphs into ballet slippers dangling from their laces. Others are purely aesthetic. The technicolour leopard-skin knives of l-glutamic acid pierce into black voids in a dramatic work she calls Easter Island Fugue.

Oechsli considers herself an artist, but embraces the parallels between her two worlds. “Science is art and art is science,” she says. “In both areas you have to be very disciplined. And both of those disciplines have no finish line.”