Prize of the National Art Museum of Moldova

Doris Dittrich, 1980, Austria

The banality of every-day life transforms into compelling information about contemporary culture when adopting the perspective of an archaeologist. The architecture of streets, bridges, even the form of an electrical post permeates the mentality of their makers.

Photography permits the creation of an archive of visual data to capture objective reality - painting permits its alteration into a poetic vision of an alternative reality: one of the corresponding narratives about the microcosm (the Self ) and the macrocosm (society).

The depiction of two bodies of water (the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic) connected by one tiny stretch of islands (the Florida Keys) transforms a geographical fact into a metaphor of human connection.

A reality of concurrence, interweaving multiple layers of intuitive associations and cultural allusions into fragmented dreamscapes. Art is the cartography of life’s journey - it depicts those encounters and experiences which shape the continents of the Self.