SALZBURG.- TERMINI, the latest and to date most extensive group of works by Heidi Specker, was created during a one-year stay in Rome in 2010. Heidi Specker uses vicarious artistic positions to formulate the concept for her photographic work as she engages with Italian culture and its history. For her art history reference space the artist opted for the painter Giorgio de Chirico, the photographer and architect Carlo Mollino, and, for the medium of film, Michelangelo Antonioni. All of which results, in TERMINI, in a commingling of motifs originating in different epochs.

Key to Heidi Specker’s unmistakable imagery is the theme of remembrance and intellectual legacy. As objets trouvés, objects are transformed into formulated questions. Surfaces are abstracted into fragments as a result of her photographic precision. Images modify spaces, often through surface close-ups. Heidi Specker creates her coherent imagery by de-contextualising her motifs and her themes and re-formulating them in groups and series.

PIAZZA DI SPAGNA 31 is the address of the apartment and studio of Surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico, which is now a museum. Specker focuses on individual objects. She projects a world of objects in which texture, materials and surfaces come to the fore. The photographs of a small sculpture, the unsettled muses, depict two figures garbed in toga-like vestments. Specker links de Chirico’s surreal interest in classicism with her own exploration of history and its transformation through reproducibility.

In VIA NAPIONE 2 Heidi Specker shows photographs of the apartment of architect, designer, photographer and dandy Carlo Mollino. His understanding of photography, modernism and eclecticism was pioneering and is something of a discovery. For her photographs Specker has chosen a number of key props from Mollino’s apartment. With these set pieces she manages to find new interpretations of the extravagant artist’s staged photographic productions.

ULTIMATUM ALLA TERRA is a small series about a clock; its title references a remake of a Hollywood classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was taken in the EUR district. The location was one of Mussolini’s large-scale urban planning projects, whose fascist classicistic architecture also provided the backdrop for some of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. This series of photographs, too, promotes the sense that time has been halted, that it is standing still, or that it is to be seen as a matrix.

Heidi Specker was born in Damme, Gemany, in 1962. She lives and works in Berlin and Leipzip.

Thomas Weski, Professor of Cultures of the Curatorial at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, will speak at the opening of the exhibition.