Astrid Klein
Les tâches dominicales
April 1–May 3, 2008
London
Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Astrid Klein’s exhibition ‘Les tâches dominicales’. Born in 1951 and trained as a painter and sculptor, Klein is a manipulator of the photographic medium. Her photographs, paintings and installations contaminate, deconstruct and revive the relationship between the photographic image and text and can be interpreted as a metaphor for the estranged personal self and its representation in society. Like the work of Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman, Klein’s art is an expression of the burgeoning media culture of Western society in the 1970s. While her work is well established in Germany, the exhibition ‘Les tâches dominicales’ (Sunday Work) at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers is her first solo show in Britain since her 1989 exhibition at the ICA (curated by Iwona Blazwick and Andrea Schlieker). The current show consists of a series of collage-based works Klein made in Paris in 1980. The title refers to the artist’s concept of making a collage every Sunday.
Upon entering the exhibition the viewer is greeted by his/her own image: a large mirror, placed on the opposite wall, presents visitors with their own reflection. This reflection, however, is distorted since the mirror surface has been smashed so that our image becomes fragmented and estranged. Next to this work, entitled Don’t look at me, is a series of large photo collages from 1980 which have never been presented outside Germany. During her residency at the Cité des Arts, Klein appropriated the so-called ‘photo roman’, a highly popular form of pulp fiction fusing the seductive imagery of cinema and the narrative structure of the comic strip. Combining elements of the romantic novel and spy stories, the representation of the female character in the ‘photo roman’ was highly charged with problems of the scopophilic voyeurism of the male gaze and the fetishisation of the female body. These images provided Klein with the opportunity to analyse questions of representation and perception of women in mainstream culture, which at the time were being discussed by theorists such as Laura Mulvey. Klein, who calls herself ‘a feminist by genetics’, was fascinated by the power of the female in the films of John Cassavetes, Jean-Luc Godard and R.W. Fassbinder. Yet, it is the combination of the boldness of the photo-roman imagery and the uncanniness of image-text relationship that makes her work so compelling and unique within the classic German art canon of the post-modern era.
