Room With A View, Foam Amsterdam

Thomas Albdorf 

Room With a View 

Foam Museum, Amsterdam
15 June - 9 September 2018

Foam presents the first solo museum exhibition of Thomas Albdorf (1982, Austria). The artist created a new body of work especially for this exhibition, which is displayed for the very first time in Foam. The works present a surreal account of what looks like a most peculiar Mediterranean holiday. We recognise volcanic landscapes that could have been snapped during a hike, marble sculptures and pottery typically found at the museum or in the souvenir shop, and a pizza dinner that could have been posted on Instagram. Whether the artist ever left his studio to document this place remains unresolved: his initial footage was sourced from google maps, google image search, social media and commercial image banks. The work is shown alongside other recent series General View (2017) and I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before (2015), that are loosely inspired by a trip to Yosemite National Park and his native Austria, respectively. 

Albdorf combines classic photographic genres with contemporary visual techniques. His landscapes and still-lifes are boldly aesthetic, but his use of the photographic medium is highly conceptual. Using both analogue and digital techniques, Albdorf constructs fictional realities from photographs of persistent visual clichés found online. His images of a mountainous landscape, a beach holiday or a flower arrangement look familiar at first glance, but are effectively impossible. Albdorf typically submits his constructions to image recognition software to see if the program could be tricked into identifying his fictions as ‘real’. 

By subtly tweaking the most prolific online stereotypes through manual interventions and imaging software, Albdorf deliberately picks apart universally recognisable visual clichés. Despite the aesthetics and humour of Albdorf’s work, decorum and digital trickery are not the end game here. They are but tools with which Albdorf addresses a more fundamental issue: the inherently flawed and self-referential imaging technologies we increasingly rely on as our window onto the world.

Text by Hinde Haest