The Principle of Superimposition 2

American artist Sara VanDerBeek extends the legacy of the 1980s Pictures Generation, blurring the boundary between sculpture and photography in order to explore ideas about memory and transience. Her creations document delicate assemblages of found objects, photographs and artworks that she curates herself, paying careful attention to the relationship between images. In photographing these constructions, VanDerBeek transforms them into lost artefacts – now without physical reality – that survive only through the secondary records. Shown in the Saatchi Gallery’s exhibition Out of Focus: Photography in 2012, The Principle of Superimposition 2 (2008) is inspired by a folding screen designed by the architect Eileen Gray. The individual components are drawn from a wide range of sources, including fashion photographs by Erwin Blumenfield, an image of women in burkas from Time/Life, photograms from László Moholy Nagy’s Vision in Motion (1947), and a fifteenth-century Chinese ceramic vase spliced with a Leni Riefenstahl photograph. Trained at the Cooper Union, VanDerBeek has mounted solo shows at institutions including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam and – last year – the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her work is represented in most of America’s major museum collections, with another edition of the present work housed in the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.