The Seven (Die Sieben)
Abigail O’Brien

The Irish artist Abigail O’Brien deals in her work with the role of rituals, rites and dogmas in people’s lives. She developed a series of works on the seven sacraments – baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, confession, anointing of the sick, priestly ordination and marriage. They stand for the important passages in a person’s life and thus also for the balance between the earthly, everyday and the spiritual, religious. The cycle consists of photographs, sculptures and everyday objects. Rituals still determine every area of ​​our lives, especially of women. Abigail O’Brien stages everyday scenes that seem isolated and brought to a standstill with an icy gaze. In these moments of concentrated pausing, everyday life around the household and children, which is forced into predetermined paths, loses some of its banality and acquires the aura of a ritual. ¹

Abigail O’Brien has won many awards for her work and her work is represented in both private and public collections, including The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, The European Central Bank, Frankfurt, Goldman Sachs, London, The Caldic Collection, Rotterdam and the Volpinum Collection, Vienna. She has shown extensively, including Haus Der Kunst, Munich, The Gemeentemuseum, Holland, and Centro National des Artes, Mexico. Born in 1957, she received a first class honours BA Fine Art Painting in 1995 and an MA Fine Art Painting in 1998, from The National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Abigail O’Brien lives and works in Ireland. ²

Born in Göttingen in 1950, Gerhard Steidl began working as a printer and designer in 1969. Soon the customers of his screen-printing workshop included Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers and Nam June Paik, among other well-known artists. In 1972, the first Steidl book Befragung der documenta (Questioning documenta) was published. From political non-fiction he then expanded into literature and selected books on art and photography. ³