L’image Et L’objet

Photographs by Claudia Angelmaier.
Fotohof Editions, Austria, 2009.

Who owns an art “masterpiece?” How does a work’s value in the marketplace, or its status in art history, affect its meaning? In her photos and assemblages, German photographer Claudia Angelmaier uses book pages, postcards, or slides of well-known works and turns these reproductions into revelations about what is “behind” the masterpiece. Especially in the most recent series “Works on Paper,” in which she photographs the back sides of postcards, the strong back lighting and slightly translucent image of the front side results in an interplay of visibility and vanishing. Angelmaier’s powerful work follows in the footsteps of contemporary photo-based artists, Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine, asking fundamental questions about appropriation art.