source: seventeengallery

Versions is an ongoing project by Oliver Laric that deals with historical and contemporary ideas relating to image hierarchies. It proposes that present methods of creative production challenge the hierarchy of an authentic or auratic ‘original’ image. Rather than privileging a primary object, Versions suggests a re-direction for image making, one in which bootlegs, copies and remixes increasingly usurp ‘originals’ in an age of digital production.

Versions takes different forms and iterations, including a series of documentary style monologues over montaged images and video clips, polyurethane casts based on reformation damaged religious figurines, a re-issued bootleg publication of a Margaret Bieber’s Ancient Copies (an academic text that deals with the protraction of Greek aesthetics into Roman art), as well as other sculptures and appropriated items that explicate contemporary image circulation and their exchange through present and historical conditions.

The project serves as a conceptual point of reference for the rest of Laric’s practice, in which a flattened image economy is mined for creative production and in the process looks at the consequences for hybridity in contemporary culture.

Recent solo projects include: Versions at MIT List Visual Arts Center, CAS Annual Award at Lincoln Museum, Art Statements Solo presentation at Art|43|Basel, Kopienkritik at Skulpturhalle Basel, Frieze Projects at Frieze Art Fair 2011.

Recent group exhibitions include: Speculations on Anonymous Materials at Fridericianum; The Dark Cube at Palais de Tokyo, Imagination adrift at Palais de Tokyo; The Imaginary Museum at Kunstverein München; Priority Moments at Herald St; Memery at Mass MoCA; The World is Flat (curated by Lauren Cornell) at X-initiative; Unmonumental at New Museum.
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source: tanyaleighton

Oliver Laric’s work seeks to parse the productive potential of the copy, the bootleg, and the remix, and examine their role in the formation of both historic and contemporary image cultures. This process is intimately tied to his intuitive, idiosyncratic brand of scholarship, which he presents through an ongoing series of fugue-like expository videos (Versions, 2009—present), and further elaborates through his appropriated object works, videos, and sculptures, all of which are densely conceptually layered and often make use of recondite, technologically sophisticated methods of fabrication. Straddling the liminal spaces between the past and the present, the authentic and the inauthentic, the original and its subsequent reflections and reconfigurations, Laric’s work collapses categories and blurs boundaries in a manner that calls into question their very existence.

Laric (born 1981 in Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien. Laric’s first solo exhibition in Germany ‘Be Water my Friend’ took place at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin in 2012. His video work ‘Versions’ (2012) premiered at Art Statements, Art|43|Basel (14-17 June 2012). Recent solo and group exhibitions include: alienate/demonstrate/edit, Artspace, Auckland (2012); Villa du Parc Centre d’art Contemporain, Annemasse, France (2012); In Other Words, NGBK, Berlin (2012), Lilliput, High Line, New York (2012); Frieze New York (2012); Kopienkritik, Skulpturhalle Basel (2011); Based in Berlin (2011); You don’t love me anymore, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2011); Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London (2011); Music for Insomniacs, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico D.F. (2011); Priority Moments, Herald Street, London (2011); Memery, Mass MoCA, (2011); Frame, Frieze Art Fair, London (2010); Artists’ Video, Vancouver Art Gallery (2010); The World is Flat (curated by Lauren Cornell), X-initiative, New York (2009); Unmonumental, New Museum, New York (2008). Forthcoming group shows include: Detours of the Imaginary (curated by Julien Fronsacq), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); The Imaginary Museum (curated by Bart van der Heide), Kunstverein München (2012); Museum of the Image, Breda, The Netherlands (2012). Laric is a co-founder of the VVORK platform.
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source: pinterest

Oliver Laric is an internet-based artist, born in 1981, in Innsbruck, Austria. Laric’s web-based artistic practice or net art is characterised by the manipulation and reinterpretation of existing cultural images. His work blurs boundaries between the authentic and the inauthentic, the original and its subsequent reflections and reconfigurations.He has participated in many group exhibitions as well as in numerous solo exhibition worldwide. He currently lives and works in Berlin.