Scenes, (Solo show Claudia Larcher) — 22,48 m² Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 14, 2014 → January 24, 2015

For her second exhibition in the Gallery 22,48 m², Claudia Larcher offers an artistic work directly related to architecture : she reveals a new series of collages and objects referring to the French architectural magazines and taking the same form as her last Baumeister series.

The variety of works is unusually presented : inspired buy Kurt Schwitters Merzbau and the work of the “Wiener Werkstätte”, she transforms the space into a Gesamtkunstwerk, integrating and designing also wall, floor and ceiling. For Scenes, she uses the gallery space — including the shop window — like a theatrical scenery. The exhibition space then becomes part of a set design, consisting of fragments of architectural buildings and pictures which are the layers that she uses for her life-sized collage. Instead of focussing on a certain architecture or building, Claudia Larcher questions the aesthetics of material, shape and movement of buildings. Adopting curtains in the inside of the gallery space, the Austrian artist creates different settings for the presentation of her paper collages, video animations and panorama objects, all of them reffering to urban landscapes. In fact, she’s interested in places that are connected to history, knowledge and memory, questioning the meaning of words “home” and “identity”.

Graduated of the University of Applied Arts, she has participated in numerous national and international group exhibitions. She has received, among others, the Game Award and the Prize of the Kunsthalle in Vienna in 2008 and is part of the artist collective Plinque since 2009. Her works generate a “continuum” of space and time that doesn’t actually exist in reality. In her videos as in her collages, she reconstructs the wandering gaze on real architectural surfaces and her work can be understood as an indication of the technique of allegory.

“This on assembly, collage or sampling based method refers to an important theme in postmodernism, where it becomes impossible to distinguish between original and copy, model and replica, reality and imagination. The redundancy and yet fragmentary nature of all documentation and depiction of reality is revealed”.

Different authors, Claudia Larcher, Baumeister, ORF Vorarlberg, 2013, extract by Ines Gebetsroither.