Untitled (Mount Wilson), 2002
C-print. 63 1/2 x 81 3/8 in. (161.3 x 206.7 cm). Signed, dated "Florian Maier-Aichen 2002" and numbered of six on the reverse.

PROVENANCE Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Private collection, London
LITERATURE J. Tumler, "Outside the Frame: Florian Maier-Aichen," Aperture, New York, Summer 2007, p. 46

To place Florian Maier-Aichen, rather, inside the photograph is to place him just about anywhere, as we are no longer dealing with a strictly delimited field of operation. The so-called digital turn in photographic technology foretells the emergence of the borderless image, dematerialized and ergonomic. Its contents always exceed the frame -consider the "classic" overview of night-time Los Angeles that Maier-Aichen regularly revisits, as a stand-in of sorts, notably in [the present lot] Untitled (Mount Wilson), 2002. To represent the endlessly receding landmass crisscrossed by gently flickering streets and freeways is to represent information; the city as gigantic circuit-board advancing on all sides. Ed Ruscha, who visualized it in much the same way, in 1987 went so far as to inscribe the words "Talk Radio" over a painting of the luminous grid, specifying the electrically charged atmosphere as the true subject of his work. In comparison with Ruscha's Talk Radio, the Maier-Aichen work is "silent" -but that is the source of its particular strength, as these or any other words would only obscure the deepstructural connection that it wants to mine between this city as subject matter and the present condition of the photograph as its material substrate. J. Tumler, "Outside the Frame," Aperture, New York, Summer 2007, p. 46