Tuesday, December 18, 2012

A Big Offender



This was published in Parkett in 2009, and the artist has taken down the image from his website. I have also been compensated by Parkett.  I had to hire a lawyer in Germany.  Fortunately, my dealer in Frankfurt was able to help me with that.  Markus Uhr is a collage artist who uses all kinds of paper and images in his work.  He took my Angel Food image and stuck it into the middle of his collage.  This would have been legal if he had sufficiently changed it.  Obviously, he didn't do that!

 Parkett claimed that they never would have published this if they had known that this was not Uhr's totally original work.  Uhr told them it was.  

The interesting part about this is that I probably never would have known, since Parkett is not widely subscribed to here in the United States.  I have a friend who does receive it, and she is the one that alerted me about the image.

I really do like mixed media work, I have been doing some myself.  I'm careful to only mix my own images, or if I use an image from another source, it is not recognizable anymore.  You can see Uhr tried to do that in this piece with images that are behind mine.  Ironically, they are from Richard Prince!  

2 comments:

  1. Delighted that you got this one shot down!

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  2. I remember when this happened, and I wrote them at the time, I think. I find it horrifying when people steal images. Sometimes I do google image searches on my photos and find them on various random blogs and websites. Once they've gone viral without attribution, or with false attribution, there's almost no stopping them.

    I'm so glad you got this one though! Perseverance and a good layer pays off!

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