Indiscreet and ill-mannered, Elke Krystufek’s work examines celebrity and the distinctions between the public and private actions of the body. Her current work, comprised of portraits of Edie Sedgwick and of herself, addresses issues surrounding representation and public spectatorship.
In the paintings of Edie Sedgwick, Krystufek references the Warholian aura with a distinctly un-Warholian painterly vocabulary. Krystufek sets off the Edie Sedgwick portraits with pictures of herself, the juxtaposition producing a commentary on desire, fame, and narcissism. In her photographs, upon which the self-portrait paintings are based, the reflexive nature of Krystufek’s work is explicitly demonstrated by the documentation of her working process. The overall effect is purposefully ambiguous, as Krystufek’s representations of herself and of Sedgwick are only seemingly collaborations with the operations of surveillance and exploitation. However, Krystufek’s complicity in these operations invites an awkward and denaturalized relationship to looking.
Elke Krystufek recently had a solo show at the Wiener Secession in Vienna, Austria, for which a catalogue is available.