In Claudia Breidenbach’s art, painting, photography and collage are all employed to give the contours and appearance of reality a dreamlike quality. Until recently, Breidenbach had focused mainly on making acrylic paintings that she then processed into collages, but she has now reintroduced the camera into her work. That addition has brought a new layer of meaning, turning her images into multi-layered explorations of how we interpret the world we see.
With a sharp yet subtle eye for color and texture, Breidenbach takes advantage of the many ways in which the camera and the painter’s art play with our ideas of proportion and perspective. Working on canvas, the artist makes collages that shift the parameters of each scene she observes, using acrylics to augment the color scheme of a photograph, or altering the dimensions of a street scene. “I digitally edit and change the photographs with acrylic colors,” she says, “melding them into a drawing.” The resulting works show us an apparently familiar world that is transformed into a distinctive personal vision. Breidenbach lives and works in Germany.
