Claudia Larcher’s career delineates a complex, polymorphic practice that confronts particular models and histories of art. In a context marked by the movement towards post-medium originality, she makes clear the bravery of instigating a constructive dialogue between her work and the fundamental elements of transmediality. Larcher justly situates the beginning of post-medium art at the start of the twentieth century and she masters establishing this dialogue both with knowledge of the rules and the challenges of doing so. To engage her work means to immerse oneself in a conceptual constellation important to the definition of “modernisms” and to the development of the historical avant-garde’s propositions. As an artist, Larcher seems to flirt with formal vocabularies that want to be recognized and that seduce the spectator through a new experience with them. Having studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Larcher is at ease with a multiplicity of formats and techniques which complicate her artistic trajectory without becoming pedantic.

Her work deals with a materialist approach that evokes Richard Sennett’s theories on craftsmanship and on the necessity to rehabilitate its function in contemporary society (1). Far from understanding the word “craft” as a return to ancestral techniques, the American sociologist proposed the development of a kind of craftsperson that works more like an information programmer or a doctor than an artist. This craftsperson becomes almost a poetic posture that Larcher assumes in her work and helps inform one’s initial encounters with it.

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(1) Richard Sennet, «The Craftsmen», 2008

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Alessandro Gallicchio, excerpt of « Promener les “Modernes” dans les coulisses de la scène », translated by Wendy Tronrud, to be published in Verena Konrad (dir.), "Claudia Larcher - Rooms", Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019

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