1:7.7... Unlimited, 2001
ART' 32 Basel
Plaster material, pigment (chromium-oxide-hydrate green)

The Unlimited project, developed by Karin Sander for the ART' 32 Basel, brings together at a single point in time the most heterogeneous epochs and subjects from the history of art. Sander's sculptures relinquish control over the forms and postures of the people reproduced here (on a scale of 1:7.7...) – on the one hand to the subjects themselves and on the other to the disinterested, infinitely precise eye of the digital camera that scans them. Thus Unlimited is indeed a conceptual work, but it is one that both incorporates classical sculptural themes such as portraiture and self-portraiture and also constitutes a (three-dimensional) photograph – and thus a figurative sculpture.

People reduced to scale and modeled out of layers of plaster and pigment are placed in individual postures and clothing in a whole range of different situations in exhibition halls and private houses. And well aware that they will emerge from their digital scans as three-dimensional figures, they are all concerned to strike a pose that in some way expresses their individuality. They thus constitute an unlimited, infinitely variable series of three-dimensional self-portraits of this digital age. Since as participants in Unlimited they are also actors in an event created by the art business, their being transformed into exhibits allows them, as it were, to discover themselves.

Harald Welzer