Artigo - Cora Pongracz, Maxwell Graham, review by Hannah Stamler, may 2023
Cora Pongracz
Untitled (Wax model of a pregnant woman’s abdomen), c. 1974
Gelatin silver print on glossy baryta paper, mounted on board
18 ⅜ × 11 ¼ inches (46.67 × 28.58 cm)
If photographer Cora Pongracz (1943–2003) is remembered today, it is for her pictures documenting Vienna’s art scene of the 1960s and ’70s: snaps of dinner parties and happenings, shots of Franz West’s and Arnulf Rainer’s high jinks. Yet her legacy of being an eyewitness is an acutely ironic one, especially in view of the artist’s tenuous relationship to authorship and authority. In this exhibition of her conceptually driven work at Maxwell Graham/Essex Street—the first time Pongracz’s art been shown outside of Austria—we saw that the artist used her camera to create compellingly diffuse images that upended ideas surrounding photographic objectivity, linearity, and truth.