Stefan Roloff
dal 22/1/2009 al 20/2/2009
Segnalato da
22/1/2009
Stefan Roloff
Deschler Galerie, Berlin
Layers. Video Works, 1983-2008. The exhibition presents the painter and filmmaker, who was born and raised in Berlin, has been living and working in New York and Berlin for the past 25 years. This period has witnessed tremendous changes, brought on by digital technology, in our understanding of art. The show demonstrates how he has significantly influenced this process and continues to participate in its development.
Video Works, 1983-2008
With the exhibition Layers by Stefan Roloff Galerie Deschler Berlin is presenting one of the earliest pioneers of digital video art. The painter and filmmaker, who was born and raised in Berlin, has been living and working in New York and Berlin for the past 25 years. This period has witnessed tremendous changes, brought on by digital technology, in our understanding of art. The exhibition Layers demonstrates how Roloff has significantly influenced this process and continues to actively participate in its development.
As early as 1983 Roloff developed, at the New York Institute of Technology, his first digital work of art in the video format: Fireball. It is the moment where the Pentagon, for the first time, made available to the public the possibility of digital image manipulation. Roloff immediately recognized the potential of this new technology and employed it to create credible new realities out of filmed or photographic material, just as in painting. By zooming into the eye of a motorcycle rider in one of his paintings, he passes through the various Layers of the image and creates a new electronic landscape - the panorama of a city. The video demonstrates how reality can turn into vision, dream into nightmare.
For his 1984 video Face, Roloff again combined painting with the new technology. He individually filmed 900 tempera Layers painted successively on a canvas and then assembled the images into a sequence. The face thus animated revolutionized the style of MTV. In 1987 Roloff created his second "Moving Painting". Peter Gabriel, the producer of Face, used it for his album Passion, the sound track for Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ. The videos were screened at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, as well as other museums.
In 2004 Roloff returned to work with the historical background of his home town Berlin. In his video Prinz Albrecht Straße 8 he morphed the photographs of prisoners taken by the Gestapo and created, in the transitional phases of the morphing sequence, photo-realistically rendered images of imaginary prisoners. The video is presented in a small space reminiscent of a photo booth, thus enhancing the oppressive effect.
Roloff's latest video Holland (2008) continues to follow his leitmotiv, revealing a hidden world beyond ist apparent reality
The exhibition will present videos spanning the period from 1983 through 2008. It is accompanied by a catalogue.
The exhibition opening will be on Friday, 23 January, 2009, 7-9 p.m. Stefan Roloff will be present.
Galerie Deschler
Auguststr. 61, 10117 Berlin