Six German photo-artists at the Berliner Kunstprojekt
Harald Raab
Six artists, one vision: advancing beyond reality to the core of the unpresentable truth. Using photographic material, Hubertus Hess, Hans Kotter, Maria Maier, Christian Rothmann, Tessa Verder and Felix Weinold encourage the viewer to go on a quest from reality to truth, following the famous idea of Paul Klee: "Art doesn’t represent the visible, but it renders visible." All of these six German artists are more committed to the esthectic autonomy of their visual creations than to the mere information or the old photographic effort of the special look to present the known like never before. By doing so they maintain a point of view opposing the rampant European trend of abusing art as a mere means for social statements of daily routine.
In the works of Hubertus Hess from Nuremberg, such an artistic concern can be most clearly seen. He has photographically examined the evidence of a statue of an angel found at a cemetery. He focuses his interest on details, which he separates from the entire figure: the posture of hand, arm and foot, the drapery of the garment, the feather structure of the wings. Frosted glass in front of the photos carry the pictures into a sphere of the unreal. Melancholy, mannered coyness: all the helplessness in the face of death and its unrelenting nature–that is the truth behind the staged and rhythmic fragment-ization of reality.
Light, color, space: these are the elements Hans Kotter from Berlin compositionally condenses into a photographic experience. Devoid of any narratory information the artist conveys in his work feelings of harmony as much as feelings of tension. All things penetrate each other in these compositions, refer to each other and get a kaleidoscope of psychedelically swinging emotions going within the viewer. The consciousness is turned off. The esthetic form dominates.
Maria Maier from Regensburg is a cross-border commuter between all sorts of artistic means of expression. She combines painting, drawing, collage and photography into an entity of the image. Her concern is calm and movement, time and space. Associative processes are condensed into an esthetic overall impression. The artist has dedicated herself to the photographic search for evidence. The collected photographic material from landscapes and cities becomes a multi-layered album of memories and the visual process of thinking ahead at home in her studio. The façades of reality turn out to be an approach to the inner truth of things and of social phenomena. The fact that real events can be anticipated by the artistic truth is shown in the triptych "Period of Time NY–Twin Towers, 2001." Just before 9/11 Maria Maier took photographs of the monumental building. She was fascinated by its forms that rendered ever-new experiences from diverse perspectives. These photographic details Maria Maier assembled into a whirl of virtually dancing forms. Even the geometrical stability doesn’t guarantee support anymore. The look of the observer is sucked into a vortex of lines and structures. Everything dissolves, disappearing into nowhere.
Christian Rothmann from Berlin connects communicative and conceptual ideas in his project "You and Me." In many areas of the world, the artist has given passersby his life-size photo to hold and photographed them in the midst of the street. This photo is combined with a second photograph, which only shows blurred constellations of color and form. Things close and things far away, things concrete and things abstract, this series invites us to visually wander between the worlds of perception.
Tessa Verder, born in the Netherlands and living in Berlin, condenses portraits with a landscape into an almost surreal statement. She takes photographs of women in different poses and projects the results into copies of paintings made by the Old Masters by using a computer. The atmospheres of the color are matched. Character studies of dignity, self-assurance, beauty as well as vulnerability develop. At the same time, one can sense some kind of menace within this idyll. The fragility of life is omnipresent. What is reality, what is fiction?
Felix Weinold’s "American Portraits" only seemingly include a social statement or even a social accusation. The artist from Augsburg overpainted the police photos of executed offenders from the US with a broad stripe of color. Identities are wiped out, personalities are destroyed. All that remains is the basic condition of the human being to be a human being.
