"Inverted"

passepartouts cardboard, book pages

The multi-part work consists of passepartouts - cut as isosceles triangles - which reveal fragmentary views on portrait photographs from the book "The Face of the Mentally Ill". Published in 1967, the publication juxtaposes photographic portraits of people with their respective clinical picture and a physiognomic analysis of their facial features.

"Inverted" on the one hand takes up the tradition of physiognomy, the measurement of the human body with a view to drawing conclusions about character traits, and on the other hand refers to the golden ratio, which has been used since antiquity as a measure of nature and human proportions: If all the leaves/parts were placed on top of each other, a pentagram turned upside down, a five-pointed star constructed from the proportions of the golden ratio, would appear. The symbol of the pentagram is also a reference to mysticism, occultism or subcultural movements like Black Metal.
(Bernhard Hosa)