Claudia Angelmaier, Color and Gray, 2006

Like Hans-Christian Schink, the subject of my last post, Claudia Angelmaier is a German artist based in Leipzig. And like Schink, she trained at its famous Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, the Academy of Visual Arts. Angelmaier’s work is conceptual, examining “the museum without walls” – art reproductions in books, postcards and lecture slides.

The play with the images of art and their history is at the heart of Claudia Angelmaier’s work whereby particular focus lies on the pictures and their mechanical reproduction, material image and contextual situation.

The work shown above uses the gray cards and step wedges that ensure correct reproduction when photographing paintings for publication. They have been cleverly composed to resemble a Constructivist painting, say by Moholy-Nagy or El Lissitski. The tools of art reproduction are used to make an original artwork, which, being a photograph, is itself a reproduction. Angelmaier’s work is precise, it’s quite beautiful, but it’s also playful.

You can see more on her website at www.claudiaangelmaier.de