Angelmaier photographs reproductions of artworks as objects so that books, postcards, transparencies or slides become the very protagonists of her photographic creations. Every photo taken by Angelmaier thus plays with two forms of representation: the photograph shows both a work of art and the medium of its representation.
In many ways, Claudia Angelmaier’s photographs are an example of art on „art about art“. Her pictures conceptually mediate between the two great lines of tradition represented by the history of art and the reproduction and / or distribution of art. In terms oft he reception of her photographic works, Angelmaier, on the one hand, stands as a representative of a current artistic development which, in ist discourse, picks up and applies the „appropriation art“ oft he 1980s only to rework it for the purposes of contemporary artistic practice. On the other hand, the work she has hitherto produced also functions as an ingenious coexistence of the development strands ot the history of art and photography which, since their first correlation in André Malraux’s „imaginary museum“, have come to stand fort he intervisual relations between a work of art and its reproduction, relations that extend beyond the act of representation.