1970s, and the Czech-born Katharina Sieverding,
who creates politically-charged, large-scale self-por-
traits, by whom Klein was greatly influenced. Klein’s
firstsoloexhibitiontookplacein1980attheKu ̈ns-
tlerhaus Hamburg; further exhibitions quickly fol-
lowed in Cologne, Berlin, and Du ̈sseldorf.
At the beginning of the 1980s, she created the
workMarche ou cre`ve(March or Die) (1981). It is
a five-panel photo work, showing Black women of
the Third World who hung themselves to escape
(according to the press reports from which Klein
obtained her image) the changes of the modern
world. The viewer’s reception of the work is directed
by the interplay of text and picture—a technique
that the artist gradually downplays in her later
work. In the course of the 1980s, Klein departed
increasingly from straightforward, easily intelligible
texts. Her works become more complex and abs-
tract, particularly through her use of a multiplicity
of experimental photographic methods. She pre-
sented images in both negative and positive, worked
with double exposure, the overlay of negatives,
photo or light drawing, etching into the emulsion,
and inserting paper cut-outs into the photographic
print. Thus she picks up the technique of the photo-
gram (or Rayogram), which was used in the 1920s
by such experimental artists as Man Ray.
In silhouette, seven dogs are arrayed across the
picture plane of a large photo panel that was part of
the installationEndzeitgefu ̈hle(End Time Feelings)
(1982) in an abandoned Hamburg factory. Their
black forms were inscribed on a photo of a factory
wall with a boarded-up door not unlike the wall
upon which it was fixed, and acted like projected
shades, racing wildly, perhaps from a horrifying
past, into an unknown apocalyptic future. A version
of this work was also placed in a subway station in
Hamburg in 1986. The setting underlines the threat,
darkness, and end-time mood of the central theme
of this work. InEndzeitgefu ̈hle, Klein takes up the
political discourse of the 1980s, but her terminology
serves as a more timeless statement. This work is in
contrast to earlier works combining picture and text
excerpted from the contemporary press, and marks
a turning point in Klein’s career.
She began managing the transformation of the
images she selects and the uncoupling of the material
from its original context, through greatly enlarging the
found elements. Thus, raster, the pattern of lines cre-
ated by a signal coming through the cathode ray tube
of the television, common in mass-media illustrations,
appear. This becomes apparent in works aseingeebnet,
eingeordnet, begradigt(Levelled, Arranged, Straight-
ened) andGedanken abgetrieben(Thought Aborted)
both of 1984.
By 1986, Klein had become a visiting professor at
the Hochschule fu ̈r Bildende Ku ̈nste in Hamburg.
Invitations to exhibit in London, Toronto, and many
other cities in Europe and overseas followed. She
received a number of German grants and scholarships,
including the Fo ̈rderpreis der Stadt Ko ̈ln (1984), the
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium (1987), and the
Kaethe-Kollwitz-Preis of the Akademie der Ku ̈nste
(1997), as well as the Kunstko ̈ln-Preis (2001). The
awards are evidence of the importance and apprecia-
tion of Astrid Klein’s work. Since 1993 she has been
professor of fine arts at the Hochschule fu ̈r Grafik und
Buchkunst, Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. In 1998,
she became a member of the Akademie der Ku ̈nste
in Berlin.
In 1994, the workAuswege (Ways Out) arose,
consisting of a wall installation that shows the
motif of women in light-coloured dresses who walk
along a narrow way repeated 11 times. Referring
back to a work of the same title from 1983, the
piece relies on the device presenting a spatial dimen-
sion into the picture that alters the architecture of the
space to create the narrative of the piece. The path
that is taken by the women in the photographs serves
as a connecting element.
fremd (Foreign) (1994), a collaboration with
Rudolf Bonvie, consists of seven individual compo-
nents presented within the exhibition space. The
viewer is also included in the pictures by mirrors
that carry the writingfremdin different languages.
Here, as in Klein’s early works, picture and text
are combined, but by the foreign languages the leg-
ibility is made more difficult and the information is
not referred compellingly to a contemporary pro-
blem. The political aspect, however, is not to
be ignored.
Klein’s interest in the context of the exhibition
space shows up also in the installation which she
created in 2001 for the Bundestag in Berlin. The
installations of fluorescent tubes, following the
course of steps in the Jakob-Kaiser-Haus, bear quo-
tations from Thomas Hobbes’Leviathan (1651),
who postulated the necessity for contractual ar-
rangements in his political philosophy as basic con-
dition for the existence of a society.
Running through Astrid’s Klein work is the ex-
amination of the relationship of text to picture,
wrenching this almost ubiquitous manifestation
of photography out of its everyday realms and pla-
cing it into images in which these relationships can be
reconsidered. This is not only a device that allows her
to analyze society’s relation to art, but to muse on the
political implications of art and photography.MiriamVossKLEIN, ASTRID