Space

---

theme and variation:
»We become conscious of the subjective value of life through the potential duration of our lifetime. Thus old people experience life as relatively short, while it appears long to a teenager. In his series Space Robert Staudinger conveys a sense of transience and simultaneously of stasis in a penetrating manner: the patient breath of eternity amid ceaseless change. This series of photos draws a similarly distant sense of time out of young and old alike. In this way Staudinger is able to create a striking depiction of the ingredients of Being (space, time and energy).«
Guido Zehetbauer Salzer

»Robert Staudinger focuses on the clear signs of the decline of the human era and the subsequent reclamation of civilization by nature. He has photo models stuff themselves with fast food until their beautiful faces are distorted to the grotesque. The unculture of excess not only does not suit us, it turns against us. It’s a boon for abandoned, empty spaces that with eloquent silence tell tales of former life. The traces of humanity are gradually recolonized by new organisms. Nature has time. At some point, we are history.
With unadorned precision, Robert Staudinger documents the peaceful calm and threatening aesthetics of this phase of transition.«
ZS ART GALERIE,
Vienna 2012

Expeditions into known territory:
Robert Staudinger’s Spaces.
» Narrow spaces, cleared out, deserted in any case. Paint on the walls, wallpaper, peeling off the wall here and there, a chair. An open cabinet, small objects on the floor, a toppled table.
Sometimes a lamp on the ceiling, but usually now just pieces of cable. Always a window on the opposite wall, backlighting in any case. Open boxes, a wooden ceiling. Cables sticking out of sockets no longer providing electricity. A table on its side, window casements fallen off their hinges.
Flaked-off layers of paint, a double bed with a headboard, arranged with a flower-patterned piece of cloth, no mattress, a thin blanket, also with a flower pattern.
A wooden cabinet, closed.
Wallpaper with moulding, in the back right corner a chair, the end of a rope hanging from the ceiling lying on it.
Cramped spaces. A white folding chair in front of a window and a green plastic lawn chair, between them a low tub as a makeshift table. Children’s drawings on the walls, coloured traces of drawing. A speech bubble very high up on the wall, too high for children’s hands – unless it was drawn standing on a table or ladder.
Three more spaces full of objects. A vacuum cleaner tube leans on the cabinet at the left, a shirt or a blouse is hanging on a cord suspended along the length of the room, another cabinet is open, plastic stuff on the floor. Another space with a red suitcase, a large cardboard box.
The last space, perhaps a workshop, at any rate with shelves on both sides, the table in front of the window could have been a makeshift workbench.«
Peter Putz,
The Eternal Archive