Opening: 30. October 2012, 19h Exhibition Duration: 31. October – 31. December 2012
Ambling through the venerable Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and looking at works of the Old Masters, the visitor will frequently encounter depictions of naked human skin. Particularly appealing is the image of the female breast, which is often bare; that is true regard- less of the beholder’s age, gender, or sexual orientation. It is probably a primeval instinct, an evolutionary program, this fundamental human desire for comfort, affection, and warmth, which Angelika Krinzinger explores in her series bearing a title whose connotations are unam- biguous: Mother’s Milk.
As to her decision to pursue her studies at the Kunsthistorisches Museum of all places, Krinzinger argues that it stills the artist’s yearning for art the way a “Maria lactans” nurses the baby Jesus.
Yet the photographer, with unfailing integrity, shows forever only a detail—the object of de- sire—in her high-resolution pictures, preserving the identities of the artists as well as of the women they portrayed. As a photography artist, Krinzinger seems not to set particular store by the size or shape of the breast. What she is especially interested in is how the Old Masters used light in their pictures. Some of them worked with subjective atmospheric lighting that could not possibly be an accurate depiction of natural illumination.
The pictures, technically perfect reproductions, clearly reveal the hairline cracks that cover the surfaces of the paintings due to their age. This craquelure is of interest to the “draftswoman working with light” because, like the aging of skin, it raises the issue of the paintings’ own transience.
