Mariele Neudecker
Born in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1965, Mariele Neudecker is Bristol-based and has lived and worked in Ireland and the UK since 1985. Internationally renowned for her atmospheric reproductions of landscapes within glass vitrines, Neudecker uses sculpture, film and photography to create a dynamic between historical cultural representations of the sublime landscape and our perception, imagination and memory of the reality of experience.
More recently, she has created an evocative film installation in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). Her etching ‘Truth is an Overrated Virtue’ is an x-ray of a female skull taken in 1952.
Mariele Neudecker is represented by Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin.
Truth is an Overrated Virtue
The x-rayed skull could be anybody. It is, coincidentally a living female from the 1950’s. The connection with death is so immediate and assumed that it is can be easily overlooked that x-rays are taken of the living.
The title is derived from a quote by Oscar Wilde: ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple’. I think our identification with this ‘head-scan’ has something to do with an iconographical association with the melancholic, the soul and the afterlife.
Artist: Mariele Neudecker
Title: Truth is an Overrated Virtue, 2007
Medium: Polymer Photogravure
Size: 69cm x 57cm
Edition: 40
No available: 15
Price: Framed £730 / Unframed £ 600
