Revenants

Talents 14 . Oskar Schmidt / Steffen Siegel
Mar 14, 2009 – Jun 2, 2009
a.d.S. Wiedergängerinnen © Oskar Schmidt
a.d.S. Wiedergängerinnen © Oskar Schmidt
a.d.S. Wiedergängerinnen © Oskar Schmidt

Bare, sparsely furnished rooms and introverted women and girls, barely present to their surroundings—the starkly reduced photographs of Oskar Schmidt are both portraits and interiors. The people and spaces seem familiar, but they remain mysterious and slightly beyond reach. These pictures do not focus on the individual characteristics of the places and people, but much more generally on their forms and postures. The women and girls portrayed are revenants, characters appropriated from the history of art and brought back to life in a new medium: photography. The strict reduction in the series treats what is visible in the photographs as a collection of well-known signs—but signs that are disassociated from their original context and not immediately legible.