Andrés Wertheim
The Museum's Ghosts
May 5—29, 2016
“It is assumed that when people go to a museum, they carefully observe the paintings and sculptures and thoroughly read the explanatory panels. But what if the characters portrayed in nearby paintings looked upon visitors while they aren't paying attention, what unusual scenes would we find?”
Andrés Wertheim’s The Museum’s Ghosts is a series of large-scale multiple exposures composed within the camera that inventively reimagine the relationships between museum-goers and the art surrounding them. Inside each frame, the seemingly inanimate subjects of various paintings and sculptures come to life, activating the same spaces as their unknowing observers. In this way, Wertheim’s composite images offer an imaginative alternate reality in which the ghosts of these historic institutions may finally come out to play, while also challenging us as viewers to reexamine how we experience art.
Andrés Wertheim is a photographer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Early in his photographic career he studied with Horacio Coppola, and later moved to Germany, where he began to photograph concerts. From 1986 on he traveled around the world documenting various places and people, publishing articles in several magazines and newspapers. Since 2004, Wertheim has photographed for international stock photography agencies in addition to exhibiting internationally. His work is housed in the Teutloff Photo + Video Collection in Bielefeld, Germany, as well as in public and private collections in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Belgium, Russia, and Canada.