MATTHIAS SCHALLER
Matthias Schaller (born 1965, Dillingen an der Donau, Germany) is a German photographer whose conceptually rigorous practice explores the relationship between presence and absence through sustained series of people-less interiors and objects. Educated in cultural anthropology at the Universities of Göttingen, Siena, and Hamburg, Schaller approaches photography as a form of indirect portraiture, in which human beings are present only through the traces they leave behind. His precisely conceived series include Purple Desk (2004–2008), a documentation of the offices of Cardinals of the Roman Curia with all personal objects removed; Fratelli d’Italia, a survey of 150 Italian opera houses; and Das Meisterstück, a study of the palettes of the great masters of Western painting.
His most celebrated series, Disportraits (2008–2009), presents original astronaut suits whose reflective visors reveal only a black void, transforming them into metaphors for human isolation and the universal condition. His work has been exhibited at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery in London.