ARTnews, 2010

CRITIC'S PICK CLAUDIA ROGGE

By David Galloway

Writhing masses of humanity wage war with tomatoes in photographer Claudia Rogge's "Battlefield" series. In "FoamCity" similarly interchangeable crowds cavort through mountains of white bubbles. Other series show anonymousthrongs marching along in matching outfits or stripped naked and draped over giant balloons. In creating these intricatescenes, the 44-year-old Düsseldorf artist is simultaneously ringmaster, choreographer, and collagist. Each new series be-gins with all-night sessions in which Rogge takes as many as 10,000 photos of individual performers demonstrating the same simple tasks or motions. Later, on her computer, she integrates selected images into complex compositions that ap-pear to be documents of a group performance. Rogge begins her improbable tableaux in a former warehouse that sheshares as a studio with her husband, the photographer-painter Stephan Kaluza. At the center of this rambling complex is a large but cozy kitchen where Rogge and her team cultivate a lively, familial atmosphere during the nightlong shoots. Major sources of inspiration include dance, theater, and opera, but also the circus. While studying communications inBerlin and Essen, where she began to work with video, Rogge became "increasingly fascinated by the concept of the mass--by parades, choirs, refugees, concertgoers, rallies, football fans, exiles." As the work evolved, she developed herown ideas about the human need to express uniformity. Rogge, who is represented by Düsseldorf's Galerie Voss, typi-cally produces images in editions of three prints in three different sizes, from 39-by-59-inchones selling for about $9,900 to 87-by-110 versions for $19,800 apiece.Though she had drawn praise as a video artist, Rogge's breakthrough came in 2002 witha project titled "mob," suggesting both mobility and an uncontrolled mass. It consisted ofa truck whose transparent trailer was loaded with 5,000 doll's heads. Rogge drove the en-semble around Europe and filmed or photographed it at various tourist locations, alongwith the wildly divergent reactions of passersby. In 2003 she set off again with a cargo ofidentical mannequins: 66 naked, bald, squatting males. Those surreal mobile con fig u ra tions were the prelude to her first photo series, "Rapport," in which a single figure was re-peated in such a way as to create geometric patterns, embedding the individual in a massof clones. Such elegant but essentially static works were followed by "Uniform," for which 12 protagonists, all in motion, were joined into more dramatic compositions, presaging the dynamism of her tomato-wielding warriors.