In her Leinwandscans (“canvas scans”) artwork group, Anita Stöhr Weber, an artist living in Berlin, takes as her theme probably the most common picture-carrying medium in the Western world – the canvas. The artist initially approaches her subject by minutely examining it with a high-resolution scanner. As if in a kind of contactless frottage, the canvases can be recorded in their real size, coloration, texture, and with all the traces of their handling. The generated picture data was subsequently reproduced using a digital pigment printing technique on matte paper (the result being surprisingly plastic).
In this body of work by Anita Stöhr Weber the reflection of the medium is also an immanent part of the picture’s genesis. By highlighting the materiality (and function) of the painting ground, the artist thematizes, in a mediated way, our perception of material reality, and thus the invisibility of what is present (the canvas in painting) and the visibility of what is absent (the canvas in her works). Superficially, we see the concrete images of commercially available canvases, which, thanks to the technology of today, can be reproduced in a “deceptively real” way. In fact, Stöhr Weber deconstructs the conditions of painting and highlights the reality of their original materiality. Lay folds also reveal narrative potential – and the complete digitalising of the world appears to erase the individual pictures.
Anita Stöhr Weber
Leinwand 01, Scan, 2013
