"Claudia Larcher's career path is characterized by a polymorphic and complex practice, which is confronted without hesitation with models and art histories. In a context marked by the race for "post-medium" originality, she shows courage by establishing a constructive dialogue between her works and the fundamental elements of transmediality, which she has been reading since her appearance at the beginning of the 20th century, and whose rules and challenges she masters with intelligence. To approach his work therefore means to immerse oneself - with a certain pleasure - in a conceptual constellation that has contributed to the definition of "modernisms" and to the formulation of the assumptions of the historical avant-gardes. The artist seems to flirt with formal vocabularies that are intended to be recognizable and that lead the viewer into a new experience of their application.
Trained at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, Claudia Larcher is at ease with a multiplicity of formats and techniques that complicate, without making it pedantic, her artistic journey. It is a "materialistic" approach to art, evoking Richard Sennett's theories on craftsmanship and the need for its rehabilitation in contemporary society (1). Far from hearing the word craftsmanship as a return to ancestral techniques, the American sociologist proposes instead the formulation of a kind of standard ideal that applies to both the computer programmer or the doctor and the artist. Thus understood, it almost becomes a poetic posture, which Claudia Larcher assumes in her work from her very first experiences."
(1) Richard Sennet, "What the hand knows. La culture de l'artisanat ", Paris, Albin Michel, 2010.
(Alessandro Gallicchio, excerpt from "Walking the "Moderns" behind the scenes", to be published in Verena Konrad (dir.), "Claudia Larcher - Rooms", Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019)
Claudia Larcher (Austria) is a recipient of the Visual Arts Committee of the Cité internationale des arts.