When one looks closely at Claudia Rogge's works, one is struck by the precision, incisiveness and subtlety of her craft. Her new works intelligently examine the aesthetic dimensions and sociological assumptions of design, as well as its essence and implication.
Born in Düsseldorf, 1965.
Claudia Rogge is a contemporary German artist known for her large-scale digital collage photographs. Elaborated from images of ballerinas, nude revellers and masked dancers set against ambiguous or sublime backgrounds, Rogge conjures strange theatrical scenes based on the Sistine Chapel. In her exhibition Ever After (2011), she directly quotes the regions of paradise, purgatory and hellish inferno from Dante Alighieri's Divine Commedia.
The artist has said of her work that she is “increasingly fascinated by the concept of the mass—by parades, choirs, refugees, concertgoers, rallies, football fans, exiles.”
Born in 1968 in Düsseldorf (Germany), she studied communication and video in Essen and Berlin before returning to her hometown. In 2002, her performance project Mob won her recognition throughout Europe, and in 2009 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow. Rogge continues to live and work in Düsseldorf, Germany.
When one looks closely at Claudia Rogge's works, one is struck by the precision, incisiveness and subtlety of her craft. Her new works intelligently examine the aesthetic dimensions and sociological assumptions of design, as well as its essence and implication. Today we understand hell better than in any golden age. Our crises tend to exacerbate more than ever and have a ripple effect on the social fabric. In this context, the identification and creation of patterns takes on a profound socio-anthropological significance, as they, in a sense, serve to impart a structural and systemic order to a world. The idea that a pattern is a kind of cultural artefact, which has a great effect and influence on collective psychology and conceptions of aesthetics, is one of the argumentative reasons for Rogge's photographic work. The cultural being does not exist outside the pattern.
We spend our lives producing and reproducing patterns, whether material or immaterial. Textiles appear as incontrovertible, factual proof of these processes of reproduction, which are rooted in nature and its continually recurring cycles. Claudia Rogge stamps the skin of her models as a kind of tattoo, so that the iterative materials and ornaments of the skin dissolve categorical boundaries and conclude in a performance of intersections and reproductions.
The repetition of poses and serial elements activates the mechanisms of an enormous choreography. Claudia Rogge's approach is to select and isolate a motif, which is then repeated within a potentially endless ensemble. In this way, the work produces an inner movement that ultimately seems distinctly unsettling. This rhythm allows conceptual speculations to flourish, reinforcing the value of these works.
Claudia Rogge's art is clearly an exercise in manipulation/replication. She works on the basis of seduction and simulation; she stages a strongly appealing visual narrative that enjoys exaggerating the beautiful and, at the same time, is acutely aware that beauty is intrinsically a hermeneutic trap. Therefore, her concerns transcend the threshold of the represented in favour of discursive replication. The chain that is woven in these new works by the artist results from the study and observation of the grammar of patterns, which are generated from the accumulation of physical and textile elements. It is evident that there is a very complex relationship between the human body and clothing. The latter is a kind of second skin, an entity that reveals much about the subject's sexual, cultural and ethnic identity.
The stigma of violence is omnipresent in the contemporary world and is often mobilised by the organs of the state itself. This violence is not only expressed through persecution, repression and mistrust, but also through homogenisation and the recognition of conformist acts: each one resembles the next. Claudia Rogge's photographic narrative represents a metonymic exercise, emphasising adjacencies and semantic shifts.
Metonymy implies precisely "a semantic alteration, which consists of giving one object the name of another, that is, referring to an object by the name of another object or another thing". In this case, the artist uses photography to enumerate a social phenomenon. Her works become the poetic realisation of a collective trauma, as well as a vision of homogenisation, and are able to establish an indisputable series of polyhedral meanings and interpretations. It is therefore perhaps not digressive to invoke the concept or term commissure introduced by Kristine Stiles, when it comes to understanding the connections or possible links between this artist's repertoire of images and the conflictive social order, which emerge as a witnessing whisper in the hermeneutic fabric of her work.
Clothes, fabrics and fashion are also cultural instruments that reveal a tacit instrumentalisation of collective tastes and desires. The serialisation that Claudia Rogge creates in her paintings is therefore a kind of denunciation and, at the same time, broadens the domain of interpretation of the cultural processes of replication, production, mimicry and homogenisation. Her works speak of this dominant will, which materialises in the identification, inventory and cataloguing of the indivisible entities of the subject and its subjectivity.
Aesthetic projects that engage in critical commentary, whether through their visual conception or an explicitly political argument, engage the system of value judgements. Not everything explicit and apparent becomes subversive, just as little as all allegorical turns become banal.
Claudia Rogge's skill as a photographer leads her to develop a plan in which conceptual resources and visual strategies are coherently linked. The formulas of authority, to which repetitions, standardised programming and the transformation of human intentions into obedience/submission or disobedience/protest inevitably belong, become visible in the textual design of these surfaces. Negotiations between artistic discourse and political or socio-critical discourse, as the case may be, often lead to conflicts.
The artist is able to establish a delicate tension between representation and conflict. The group phenomenon and the homogenisation of the subject in the mass are embodied in her artistic work. Claudia Rogge's work makes visible these alliances between image and cultural critique. The artist knows that repetitions often lead to meaninglessness and the militarisation of behaviour, but also engender cultural mechanisms and anthropological conclusions that feed urban mythologies and the physical aesthetics of reproduction and rebellion.
Andrés Isaac Santana