Week 41 - 2016
© Stefan Schröder, Contributor, Preus museum, Christopher Williams, 2005. Owned by the artist.
Contributer
How do you survive as an artist in Norway? With a straw stuck into the federal budget? Or is there some other circumstance?
Stefan Schröder focuses on this in his series "Contributor." To survive as an artist he takes on side jobs as a carpenter at building sites and private homes, or as an exhibition installer for various arts institutions. The side jobs have a kind of connection to his work as an artist; they involve creative processes with varied ideas, materials, spaces, and people that yield a deliberate result.
In 2004 Schröder first began systematically working with photography as an art form, at the same time that he started receiving steady assignments as an exhibition installer at the Preus Museum. He says it is at the Museum that he has received his photographic education, in that he has worked with and mounted some of the finest photographs ever taken.
One of the very first pictures Schröder took in his series is this one, when among other things he mounted the image by the American photographer Christopher Williams at the Preus Museum.