Text

This series was created on behalf of the celebrations of the 500. anniversary of Lucas Cranach the younger and a competition for the "Lucas Cranach award" by Lucas Cranach foundation Wittenberg in 2015. The Cranach family consisted of mainly two artists, Lucas Cranach the elder and the younger, working during the time of 1480 until 1530, who were very successfull in their time and had a huge production workshop in Saxony. Also important for their work was the connection with the historical change in society which was brought by reformation. In my collage work I am using press photos from the "Süddeutsche Zeitung". For each image three newspaper clippings are combined. One of them shows an image by the artist of the Cranach family and their workshop. For these images I also used clippings which were taken from old catalogues or books about them. By combining the historical image with the press photos I want to show the iconographical correlation of the work of the Cranach family with images of our contemporary society. It seems amazing how contents of images stayed in some way the same throughout history during so many centuries. In my work the tradition of panel painting and its iconographic contents have always been of great interest for me. In Art History it is to be seen how these themes are recited again and again from late medieval ages on in the following eras. Later they are resumed by photography. By making the series I discovered the similiarity of the Cranach´s themes which sometimes seem to be almost hollywoodlike. Also the use of even abstract subjects is remarkable, which can be seen for example in their way of depictiong the hat fashion of this time.