Valie Export
Salzburg Cycle, 01-2012, 2001
Valie Export (Austrian, born 1940), Salzburg Cycle, 01-2012, 2001, digital photograph, 29 1/2 x 24 1/2 in. Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, 2014.7. Valie Export © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Bildrecht, Vienna.
In this work, Valie Export digitally manipulates and merges original photographs of nurses and hospital architecture. The women and their work environments form one image, as glass windows meet skin and the curve of an eye transforms into molding. In 2007, critic Eleanor Heartney described this series in Art in America as “the human getting subsumed into heartless corporate architecture, or... emblems of modernist impersonality assuming human characteristics.”