Altar, 2002

This edition by Luc Tuymans is based on interior shots of The Temple, the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as Mormons) in Salt Lake City, Utah. When Tuymans saw these in a television documentary, he took Polaroid shots of the TV broadcast. He then used these Polaroids as source material for a series of watercolors before photographing them again with his Polaroid camera. With each step of this process, the image gradually disappeared until it faded into an abstract, almost monochromatic layer. For this edition, which was published for documenta 11, the image was placed behind sandblasted opaque plexiglass to create further alienation and amplify the work's haunting quality.