In her work, Sofie Bird Møller refers to the famous painting “Self Portrait in Fur Coat” by Albrecht Dürer from the year 1500. The motif was converted into rough pixels. You would more or less guess the self-portrait from afar, yet the nearer you get to the work, the more the motif dissolves into grey-coloured squares and the self-portrait disappears. The motif is anonymised by pixelization.
Vice versa, the recognisability of the picture underlines the potential to exploit iconographic masterpieces. The work furthermore tackles the field of tension between the original and the reproduction in the depiction of the collective memory. Those who have not seen the original in the museum only know the self-portrait from the internet in pixelized form and in any particular size anyhow.
Sofie Bird Møller, born in 1974 in Høie Taastrup, Denmark, lives and works in Munich and Berlin.
