In his exhibition ‘Photoplastik’, Oliver Laric transforms the main room of Vienna’s Secession into a sculpture hall, gathering artworks and public sculpture from antiquity to the present. Laric’s works, which retool and recontextualize their original referents, are 3D printed from digital files that were captured and further manipulated by the artist. Using a hand-held 3D scanner, Laric visited and recorded numerous objects in public spaces and prestigious institutions in Vienna such as the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Albertina and the Institute of Classical Archaeology.

The selection of artworks and objects on view is influenced by Laric’s longtime research into the history and development of 3D technology, as well as the question of authorship in the digital age and our present cultural moment, created in large part by the internet where content and information circulate quickly and uncontrollably. These works point to the absurdism of the idea of singularity as an anarchic structure. A central part of the exhibition therefore exists outside of the Secession’s galleries – found on the internet – where Laric has shared the 3D data of the objects on view and many more that were created during the course of work on the exhibition. These files are free to download and without usage restrictions.

The issue of copyright and the public domain is a central concern of Laric’s, who has long negotiated access to public collections and museums as a central element of his practice. Many of the issues tackled by the artist in his work stem from current cultural and scientific discourses – the artist sees digital forms of reproduction and their distribution as a now inherent factor affecting analog formats such as photography, film and sculpture.

The exhibition title refers to Eduard Kuchinkas’ 1926 book ‘The Photo Plastic’. Kuchinkas was a Viennese photo-historian, focusing on photographic sculptures, reliefs and similar procedures of replication. His book begins with François Willème, a pioneer in the field of three dimensional reproduction, working in the 19th century. A version of Willème’s self-portrait – originally created in 1860 – is re-presented by Laric in ‘Photoplastik’.