In January 1945, the artist-architect Frederick Kiesler (1890 – 1965) and the photographer Percy Rainford (1901 – 1976) met the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) in Duchamp’s New York studio in order to take pictures of the space and produce portraits for a photo collage. Following Kiesler and Duchamp’s instructions, Rainford captured the atelier from a series of unusual camera angles. Kiesler then assembled these images to create a folding photographic triptych – Les Larves d’Imagie d’Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp – for the art magazine View (No. 1, March 1945), which was dedicated to Marcel Duchamp.

The original prints, which can now be found in the archive of the Frederick Kiesler Foundation, provide the starting point for Gregor Schmoll’s new work Puparium: Atelier/Studio. In the work, Schmoll moves between objective sobriety and eulogistic transfiguration as he paraphrases both the photographic documentation and the photographic documents themselves. He uses this playful re-enactment to deconstruct the assumption that photography captures “reality” with pictorial accuracy and expose the “mythmaking” that interprets the studio space as a mysterious place of artistic creation.

Gregor Schmoll (*1970 in Bruck an der Mur/Austria) lives and works in Vienna.

Opening event: Thursday, Jun 15, 6 pm