Matts Leiderstam’s work is rooted in his ongoing interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century genre painting. He is particularly drawn to in the physical environments where such works were originally created. For The Artist is at Niagara Falls, Leiderstam looked to the Albright-Knox’s collection for inspiration, ultimately choosing to research and reproduce a painting made over a century earlier by an unknown artist, View of Niagara Falls. Leiderstam staged the finished facsimile in a location that matched the vantage point of the Niagara Falls landscape depicted by the nineteenth-century artist, and then he photographed the scene to make an altogether new work of art. Here, Leiderstam creates new meaning and context for the painting while also cleverly referencing the site’s historical connection to artmaking, the method of working en plein air, or “in the open air,” popularized by Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, and the ways in which the notion of landscape continues to resonate with contemporary artists. He has explained: “I am not so much interested in the accumulation of knowledge but in how I can put it to work in general to reproduce the landscapes through various artistic techniques and strategies.”

Label from Picturing Niagara, September 30, 2017–August 5, 2018