Julia Oschatz (b. Darmstadt, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) is a German contemporary artists and set designer. Her work interweaves diverse media, including painting, drawing, video, installation, and stage decoration, and draws on a rich reservoir of existing images and stories. Oschatz’s more recent pieces respond to the works of Old Masters, often presenting their reverse sides. By altering their composition and titles or the names of the collections that hold them, the artist reveals unimagined aspects and generates new meanings. Scrambling the letters PRADO to produce adorP or turning BRUEGEL into grueBel, the German for “to brood,” she signals that there is a semantic component to this creative engagement. The Old Master pictures illustrate the new era in painting that began with the introduction of perspective. Oschatz, however, turns her attention to them at a time when central perspective has long disintegrated and the subject-object relation appears much less unequivocal than it did in the Renaissance. Julia Oschatz’s works address the breakdown of what was once a firmly established symbolic space and its metaphysical foundations and demonstrate that any rendition of reality is always also a staged scenario. The gaze itself, in other words, is not a physiological truth but a cultural achievement.
The second monograph on Julia Oschatz’s art contains essays by Oliver Leistert, Ursula Panhans-Bühler, and Frank Raddatz.
