This publication features Norbert Artner’s series of photographs entitled Studios for the first time. In 2008 he began systematically to photograph studios – first in Linz and Vienna, later in Berlin, Amsterdam, Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. The technique used allows each studio consisting of many individual digital images to appear as an image space. A multitude of apparatus-based perspectives are compressed in such a way by the artist’s intervention that in spite of the stupendous simultaneity of angles and focal lengths they appear as a space, a studio, simulating a single camera shot, a view actually impossible to achieve. Norbert Artner applies this technique to a particular motif: the artist’s studio or atelier. Ultimately two opposite poles are fused together in the photographic appropriation and alienation, namely the beginning and the end of an art work’s story: its creation in the studio and its reception in the exhibition space. Two states – with the greatest mystery of all remaining the transition from one to the other. Stefanie Hoch

Norbert Artner, *1963 in Linz, Austria. Lives and works in Linz, Austria and Berlin, Germany.