Mark Landis forged and donated paintings to museums until his activities were publicly exposed in 2010. During a public one-day residency as part of the local annex of the Landis Museum (a show that jumped off from his acts and possible motives), I looked at the contemporary landscape of art-image appropriation.

This research focused on the facilitation of such appropriation by institutions, the prioritising of the surface in the digital image, and the financial incentive behind fostering a 'hack appeal' in the art world. Methods of reproduction had newly emerged in synograph technology, and the pinterest-like, open-access licensing/image marketing of the Rijksmuseum collection.

Five variations of an artwork based on a downloaded Rijksstudio image were made into 250 A5 postcards, which were then annotated throughout the day with fragments of a talk delivered in the evening. These were then available to be taken away during the rest of the exhibition.

Photography by Simon Mills

Landis museum residency
2018