Edition Detail

The Vienna-based artist Dorit Margreiter has been exploring the relationship between the present and history, as well as the interplay between reality, representation, and fiction for years. Modern and contemporary architectures often play a central role in her work. The black-and-white photograph titled Bearing Masonry, Concrete Block (1923) captures a crumbled concrete fragment of the facade of the Ennis Brown House in Los Angeles, an architectural icon designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, which served as a film set for numerous Hollywood productions and was destroyed by an earthquake in 1992. In her work, Margreiter examines transfers or translations of architecture and materiality into various forms of media representation. The concrete fragment, photographed in the studio, was greatly enlarged and staged through a play of sharpness and blur. The two-dimensional depiction of the original shows what remains of the icon – a fragment of reality.