calendario eventi  :: 

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20/3/2008

Two exhibitions

Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Becoming Visible

Photographic Works
In the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection in Hamburger Bahnhof

Presented in the Rieckhallen are selected positions in artistic photography, which has gained increasing importance in the visual arts since the 1970s. Featured are works by artists who have in various ways elaborated their views of the world photographically. Playing important roles are questions regarding the physiology and psychology of vision, as well as those related to the social, economic, historical, and cultural contexts to which these photographic motifs refer.

In an era characterized by the mass production and distribution of photographic imagery, views of locations, buildings, landscapes, and passersby that have been seized by the camera raise many questions: What exactly are we seeing when we contemplate these images? What relationship do they have to the reality they represent? Does the reality seen in photographs become perceptible only through them, or do they instead render strange a putatively familiar reality? How does the visible relate to the non‑visible?

By deploying primarily analog photographic procedures, artists such as Sigmar Polke, Rodney Graham and David Claerbout have engaged in experimentation at the borderline of visibility, while artists like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte and Thomas Struth have cultivated documentary approaches. Emphatically conceptual uses of photography are exemplified by the works of Jeff Wall, Peter Fischli & David Weiss and Stan Douglas.

In their photo works, bleak residential settlements and barren terrain, industrial architecture and airports are captured in images, along with crowded shopping streets and lonely shorelines, grand museum galleries and exotic landscapes. Becoming visible here is world whose photographic images fluctuate between the sublime and the prosaic, between cliché and mystery.

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Wolfgang Tillmans

New Works. Works owned by the Nationalgalerie,
and the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection in Hamburger Bahnhof, Loans

German artist Wolfgang Tillmans became known in the 1990s with highly original portraits and snapshots from the realm of pop culture. In 2000, he won the coveted “Turner Prize” in London for an installation consisting of portraits, still‑lives and city views. Since then, Tillmans has continually expanded the range of his work, and has concentrated on photographic processes themselves, on the structures and properties of photographic paper. These new, often entirely “abstract” works stand at the center of this exhibition, the largest of Tillmans’ work to date in Germany, and consisting of more than 200 works from the years 1986 to 2008.

The title “Lighter” (i.e., cigarette lighter) refers to a series of works which revolve around the magical qualities of illuminated paper. Photography no longer functions here as a medium of representation, but instead mainly as a material object. In the so‑called “paper drops,” the real effects of the paper are translated into compositions that are almost graphic in appearance, and hence rendered almost “palpable.” Other works are dominated by printing processes, generating a provocative interplay between motif and surface, image and object.

The show begins with the early photocopy works, continues with a reconstruction of the multipart Turner Prize room and the politically oriented table installation “Truth Study Center.” The focus of the conclusion is the latest pieces.

A catalog publication will accompany the exhibition (Hatje Cantz Verlag); the paperback version
will be available at the museum counter, while the hardcover will be sold in bookshops

Hamburger Bahnhof
Invalidenstrasse 50-51 - Berlin

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