KLINGSOR’S CASTLE, 1981
Collage of colour photographs on silver card. 11½ x 7½in. (29.6 x 19cm.)
Signed with the monogram ’81
Inscribed on the reverse with the name of the artist, the title and the year.
Provenance
National Trust bequest.
The work is unframed and has probably never been exhibited.
Klingsor is a devil figure from Wagner’s Parsifal. He achieved his magic power through accepting voluntary castration. His vendetta against the knights of the Holy Grail was to inflict on them the same mutilation.
This is one of a number of photographic collages that Colquhoun executed late in her career. Other examples include La Chapelle Étrange (1980), Le Manoir Etrange (1980), and Village and Waterfall (1980).
By releasing images from their natural context, the laws of perspective and other restraints, these collages demand that the viewer sees the photographic images in a new and unexpected light. In these collages Colquhoun questions the relationships between objects by the way in which she juxtaposes them, distorts depth cues and, in the present example, by making the image occupy a parallelogram rather than a rectangle.