With the group of works "False Friends", which has been created since 1999, Elisabeth Wagner transposes figures from historical paintings of various centuries into the physicality of three-dimensional portrait busts made of plaster or ceramics. In doing so, the artist, who works as a professor, intervenes strongly in the originals with a conceptual approach, on the one hand by removing the narrative pictorial contexts and material attributes of the figures such as jewelry or insignia, but on the other hand by introducing surprising inventions in the area of coloration or by leaving the sensitively worked out skin surfaces in the matte white tone of the plastic material.
Thus Wagner's busts perform the work of a double mediation as embodiments of purely art-historical models, which, however, through alienation and elevation from their contexts as sculptural interpretations of individuals, are carefully transferred into our time and thus gain a contemporary quality. - Not least as irritatingly tangible beings of change between the times.