Ann Mandelbaum

The American artist Ann Mandelbaum, born in 1945 and now living in New York, began as a photographer and has turned once again to photography after having devoted herself for some time to painting.She creates in her still-life-like photographs and luminous photograms an unlocalizable, secretive and unsettling reality of her own, which confronts us - even when her subject is not the human body - with the themes of physical decay and sexuality. It is in fact this very mixture of the alien and the familiar, of corporal landscapes and mummified flora and fauna, the changing point of view, that gives these works their ambivalent sensuality.Her work possesses symbolistic characteristics and could without difficulty be placed within a tradition in which mystery and riddle were of central importance in art. In Ann Mandelbaum's work, however, the metaphors for destruction and alienation of the body are also expressions of a particular contemporary situation in intellectual history.