Two artists meet in the exhibition In Relation to Places and Time, Claudia Larcher and Hubert Lobnig, enhancing their understanding of the alterability of architecture and spatial volumes, and consequently also the reception of their subject matter.
Claudia Larcher shows several collages sourced from the images of single issues of different architecture journals. She has based the dimensions of her work on the formats of the various publications and also retained the images’ positions relative to one another in the print media concerned. The deserted architectural motifs no longer function as cultural historical testimonies, nor do they fulfill the archival mandate intrinsic to them; in their translation into artworks they develop instead all the more emphatic intrinsic relationships which both promote and challenge the constructing gaze, with the three-dimensional layering of the images of architecture commemorated through appropriation the artist’s work ultimately becomes an object itself. Here — starting with the architecture — she alludes to the constructing photographic view of precisely that, revealing a meta-level when she extracts constructs of architecture images for further constructive use while the collaged body of the image articulates itself as a volume through its densification in the actual space.
Similar architecture collages are to be found in another work, entitled Panorama, the shape of which can be identified as a hanging lamp object: Analogous to the design item it references, light breaks in the shade in the collage application, whereby the space inside is perceived through the mask of the constructed space outside to allude to the presence of the architecture that has been brought indoors — both in the masking of the shade like a reversed diorama, as well as in the interconnection with the concrete object.