Claudia Reinhardt
Claudia Reinhardt (* 1964 in Viernheim/South Hesse) lives and works as a photographer and artist in Berlin. She completed her studies at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. From 2000–2012 she taught as professor in the Department of Photography at the National Art Academy in Bergen, Norway.
Reinhardt became known, among other things, through her photographic work Killing Me Softly – Todesarten (2004), a series of photographs dealing with female artists who killed themselves: Diane Arbus, Ingeborg Bachmann, Karin Boye, Adelheid Duvanel, Clara Immerwahr, Sarah Kane, Pierre Molinier, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Unica Zürn. The suicides are staged by Reinhardt with herself as model. Her text-image book No Place Like Home (2005) is about her own childhood, about the meaning of origin and social class. This work was also realized as a twelve-minute video. In the video work Liebesmüh’ (2010) Reinhardt restages fictional female characters, that were made famous by male authors. Nora by Henrik Ibsen, Nana by Èmile Zola, Effi Briest by Theodore Fontane, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert are reinterpreted and placed in a contemporary context. In 2011 she realised the installation Marion, a video work about Marion Hoffmann, who was Marilyn Monroe’s double for 35 years. The photo series Tomb of Love – Grabkammer der Liebe once again deals with the subject of suicide and shows couples who killed themselves together. Several of the families portrayed by Reinhardt in a kind of reenactment took their own lives because of the threat of the National Socialists. For Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte, the destruction of their “spiritual home Europe” was the reason for their joint suicide. With Michael and Monika Stahl, Reinhardt focuses on two “victims of the Hartz IV laws (Germany’s social welfare measures)” who took their own lives in 2005 because they could not bear their social decline.
Reinhardt’s works are exhibited nationally and internationally and are represented in the collections of F.C. Gundlach, Hamburg and Gabi and Wilhelm Schürmann, Aachen.
