Piranesi State 1, Lothar Osterburg

Friends of the Art Museum Annual Meeting and Purchase Party," Jul-2012, Steve Goddard Lothar Osterburg’s Piranesi is a cluster of projects comprising sculptural models, photogravures, and a collaborative video. Exhibited here are the two states, or versions, of Osterburg’s primary Piranesi photogravure, a related photogravure, Trailerpark, that shows a detail of the Piranesi project late in its development, and the video (produced in collaboration with composer Elizabeth Brown). Also exhibited are two of the Spencer Museum’s prints by the eighteenth century Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi: the first and second state of the title page for the remarkable series of dungeonlike etchings, the Carceri-the print series that inspired Osterburg’s project. Ultimately Piranesi is about theater and staging, inspiration, and creativity; the interplay between photography, printmaking, cinema, and music; and an obsessive dedication to process and technical excellence (Osterburg is a master of the photogravure process, a hybrid photographic and etching technique). The artist explains in the liner notes to the DVD: Piranesi, the 3rd collaboration between Lothar Osterburg and Elizabeth Brown, is inspired by the dramatic, exaggerated architectural world created by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) in his Carceri, or imaginary prisons. One of the masterpieces of printmaking, the Carceri are notable for being issued in two states: initially in 1744 when Piranesi was 24, then again 17 years later, in a heavily worked, dramatically darker version; these two states give the viewer a unique insight into the creative mind and working process of the artist. In his homage to Piranesi, Osterburg uses stop-motion animation to capture the many stages in his own unique artistic process, from the initial conception to the completion of a photogravure, his printmaking specialty. Osterburg and Piranesi, who share an October 4th birthday, both combine a unique artistic vision with an outstanding technical expertise in etching. The eccentric and evocative voice of the theremin combines with the string quartet’s long history in western culture to capture Piranesi’s world in sound.