Rückenfiguren, 2024-ongoing

Exhibitions:
Remote, NUB Project Space, Pistoia, 2024
curated by Condylura


Press:
Juliet


Pictures:
Portrait of the mother as a  Rückenfigur, 2024
AI-generated image, inkjet print on cotton paper, 60x120cm


Ph:
Francesca Lenzi The images in the Rückenfigurenseries were generated by fine-tuning generative AI models, each trained on a subject-specific corpus of scanned and digitised photographs drawn from the artist’s family albums. By treating signs of time—such as scratches and dust—as well as the imperfections of amateur analogue photography as semantic elements of their own visual language, these fine-tuned models produce a hybrid aesthetic situated at the intersection of statistical process and emotional density.

The series takes up from Romanticism the motif of the Rückenfigur, a figure seen from behind, absorbed in contemplation, oriented toward something mysteriously other and itself inaccessible. The portraits as Rückenfigur play on this limit between the recognisability and unrecognisability of the subject, opening a gap between data-grounded statistical processing and the alterity it produces, evoking the possibility of a technological sublime.

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