Oberdanner’s magnificent photographic book is set in the Louvre and focuses on French art and the Enlightenment. The interiors and exteriors of this prototypical museum, the people to be found there (employees, visitors), and of course carefully selected exhibits are combined into scenes which recreate an ideal, fictitious museum visit. The artist explores the art history context and highlights artistic qualities, using surprising close-ups and startling details. Oberdanner’s penchant for the figurative and the sculptural – she herself is both a sculptress and a photographer – are reflected in the choice of art works and the emphasis on materiality and physicality. Almost as an aside, the captions contain encyclopaedic facts about the history of the Louvre itself, the political circumstances of the day, and anecdotes on the personalities portrayed; they reflect the historical and ideological determining factors of the museum as a large-scale cultural construct. The essay by Suzie Jungeun Lee looks at Annelies Oberdanner’s work method. In her preface art historian Marta Smolińska analyses the photographic book, referencing Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire, in which the close ties between art historiography and photography.

Annelies Oberdanner,* 1961 in Innsbruck, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna.