In Laric’s version, past and present eerily dovetail with information-age rupture the sculpture’s bulky size belies its lightweight hollow core, and from a distance the all-white resin suggests the marble of Greco Roman antiquity. ![]() Meanwhile, Max Klinger: Beethoven, 1902 – at a height of 2,66 metres Laric’s largest work to date – is a 3D reproduction of a Beethoven portrait by Max Klinger originally made from marble, alabaster, amber, bronze, and ivory, and which took Klinger fifteen years to make before it was installed in the Secession’s 14th exhibition of 1902, along with Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901). All images courtesy: the artist and Secession, Vienna photographs: Iris Ranzinger Oliver Laric, 'Photoplastik', 2016, installation view at Secession, Vienna. The homage – in synthetic polyamide – to the Frenchman, François Willème, Self Portrait, around 1860, shows a quartet of figures scaled down to pedestal size in large, medium, small and extra small formats. Laric found examples of these photo-derived 19th-century sculptures in the Albertina, which then became a series of three-dimensional prints. Touring Europe with his invention Willème eventually found his way to Vienna. Such sculptures were cheap and quick to produce in multiples a soon-booming industry was born. While conducting research for ‘Photoplastik’, Laric discovered that in 1860 the French sculptor and photographer Francois Willème patented a device for the mechanical production of three-dimensional portraits, made using 24 cameras placed around the sitter in a circle. Laric’s research in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Albertina, and the University of Vienna’s Institute for Classical Archeology served as the basis for new sculptures, all dated 2016. ![]() ![]() For his very ‘today’ exhibition ‘Photoplastik’ at Vienna’s Secession, Berlin-based artist Oliver Laric opted to begin in the slipstream of yesteryear. Its urban fabric reminds you of its heyday as empire confronted with modernity, even as today it enters – like the rest of the world – a bionic, technological and robotic revolution full tilt. Vienna is a city of monuments to its storied history, from its Roman ruins to the last Russian soldier of World War II.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |