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Kirsten Pieroth // Untitled (Loan)
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 Kirsten Pieroth Born (1970) and lives in Germany. Recent solo exhibitions: Artists Space, New York (2005), Secession, Vienna (2005), Klosterfelde, Berlin (2007); recent group exhibitions: Victoria Miro Gallery, London (2007), Hannover Museum, Germany (2007), BAWAG Foundation, Vienna (2007), Tate Modern, London (2007).

The work Untitled (Loan) (2007) documents this Berlin-based artist’s contribution to the group exhibition “Learn to Read” at the Tate Modern, London, in 2007. Kirsten Pieroth had borrowed the wall label for the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in Paris in order to exhibit it as a readymade. She used this self-reflexive gesture to reenact the paradigmatic shift from work to frame in the Conceptual art of the 1960s. Two separate series of photographs feature museum workers in Paris and London removing and affixing wall labels, alongside a shot of the Mona Lisa itself without its label, protected by bulletproof glass. An additional photograph in a display case captures the mass of tourists admiring the Mona Lisa as if she were a Hollywood star. Beside the photograph is the loan contract Pieroth signed with the Louvre, where the label’s insurance value is specified as 35 Euros – an ironic examination of the exhibition industry and its administrative aspects.