Heim
03.02. 2011 -26.02. 2011, Galerie 22,48m2, Paris
curated by Yvonne Ruescher
Strange familiarity / familiar strangeness
The exhibition of Claudia Larcher at 22.48 m2 shows a set of works that have in common the notion of " heim ", a German word that means both the country where you were born, the village where you grew up, but also the house of your childhood or the one where you live.
For the young Austrian artist "heim" embodies the idea of identity, linkage and history in terms of lives. In her videos Claudia Larcher shows spaces that are related to her feelings of intimacy, familiarity and memories . The father's house (in Heim ), home gardens, (in Nachbarn) or the home of a friend (in Stockholm). The spaces she approaches are firstly topographical realities and secondly, they are spaces of projection, imagination and memory. In the display of the artist, the ordinary is always fertilized by a special magic and the most random items become fragments of a mystery - sinister.
Visual constructions, as Heim and Nachbarn that mix stills and moving images, create a technical uncertainty that our eyes fail to discern. Despite the familiarity of what is shown , it arises in the viewer's mind a sense of unease and strangeness. And the artist insists on this ambivalence. Doubled with rumbling soundtracks, these video animations reveal carefully fragments of everyday life, they accentuate what is familiar, and simultaneously these images evoke their opposites, and build a panoramic view of the whole fantasy that gives birth to a creepy strangeness.
According to Claudia Larcher reality always mixes up with a poetic and surreal exaggeration. You never know what is true and what is wrong, what is fact and what is fiction. Transitions are too smooth, too invisible between the stills and the moving images, between true and false, between revelation and secret, between idyll and horror.
Claudia Larcher was born in 1979.
She graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.
