The artist Oskar Schmidt has been dealing with the depiction of figures, objects and spaces in his photographic oeuvre since many years. He unfailingly reduces his arrangements to the fundamental and thereby refines their performance right down to the last detail. In his current work The American Series Schmidt takes away the pictures’ colour and creates photographs in »honest« black and white. The origins of his images are either icons of photography or art history. Photographs such as those by Walker Evans that were taken in America during the years of the Great Depression in the 1930ies. As a photographer, Evans travelled through the USA within a hitherto unique documentary project initiated by the US government in order to capture the aftermath of the economic and social crises during that time and to construct a visual argumentation against the collapse the promised land of the USA.

Using a mixture of appropriation and re-enactment, Oskar Schmidt is constructing the setting of Evan’s pictures around 75 years after and re-photographs those using a large format camera. His images seem to re-capture their American relatives starting from weather-beaten wood to artefacts of a Spartan lifestyle to the dusk of the dust bowl. Yet still, the images are reconstructions in the artist’s studio. They show as studio settings that differ to their predecessors showing a variation of the arrangements or perspective and hence evoke a view unto the construction of history.

Via the repetition of historical images Oskar Schmidt disposes himself of the still prevalent promise regarding the authenticity of photography and constructs new images that can sustain their alleged original. (Thilo Scheffler)

With his conceptual works Theo Boettger targets those strengths and mechanisms within the social and cultural system which keep the functioning of late capitalism and the resulting conflict situations in motion. It is out of this that he develops his strategies of visualisation in which the general perception of the world, the collective commitment and the complexity of his own thought processes come together and are synthesised in pictorial analogies. They become the projection surface for feelings of oppression and fear which demonstrate apocalyptic qualities. Indeed, with the blend of quotations from painting, objects, sculpture, cartoons, writing and drawing, with documentary notes and the amalgam of advertising topoi and metaphors from cyberspace, the ambiguous debate becomes an extensive politicalartistic statement in which individual and collective experience are equally contained. We could say that Theo Boettger participates with great directness in the varied games of human existence which are subjected to pressure from both within and without. He operates with sensitivities and emotions at the interface between personal and social space and concentrates on making us aware of radical statements and comments on social conditions with an Old Testament vehemence, at the same time stepping beyond the individual framework with substantial utterances.

Herbert Schirmer, 2010

In public spaces Hannes Broecker is looking for unconsumed, meaningful »images« within which the lower layers of our urban society are mirrored. 

He is interested in those places and situations within which the arranged texture of the urban space is roughened according to space, architecture and people and where traces of the continual collective usage show and the individual use of the city – also the one withstanding rules and standards – is becoming visible. 

Streets torn open, a path blocked by bulky waste, sleeping places of homeless people, walls covered in graffiti, hoardings decorated wildly with posters, the signal colours of barrier tape – emanating from such visual impulses and the thus belonging realities Broecker is intuitionally layering his images, objects and installations. Loud and abrasively the viewer is often confronted with impervious boundaries. Because it is not about the aesthetic cultivating of a trivial motif but the breaking of a familiar experience of every day life in order to rediscover ones own world …

(Mathias Wagner)

»Involuntary images« – is what Martina Wolf likes to call her works and it sounds just like she wanted to force the found situations to become art in their afterlives. But the artist is not dealing with constraint as such regarding the motifs. 

It is us, the viewers, who are pressured into a mode of alienation from our daily routine: the mode of slowness. 

Especially when Martina Wolf is dealing with moving images the contrast becomes clear. Daily, the rhythm of fast steps and ceaselessly changing information determine our perception. 

But Martina Wolf counts on one single image information and reduces the movement so drastically that the whole sequence seems static, similar to photographs. While composing her videos she is looking for framing elements that undermine that analogy. She loves fixing her camera and our perspective via long takes. Windows, mirroring architecture, close and open so slowly that reflection and illusion blur with reality. To wait for something becomes a principle and boundaries such as doors or window frames underline the »unbearable slowness of being«. The optical lockings reverse themselves into the contrary in front of her lens. They are meant to seal but open – involuntarily – new perspectives.

 (Susanne Altmann)

Ayelen Coccoz approaches the three dimensional work with a photographic logic. Sculpture, photography and drawing merge in her objects, placed in an ambiguous position between the three and bi dimensional, document and fiction, manual and mechanic.

And no more shall we part depict a series of sordid rural scenes tainted by resentful and evil stories. She departs from real photographic documents taken in Argentina and Germany in the early 1900. Reflecting on the theatrical and fictional content of photography she reconstructs these scenes as small stages where the characters are also part of the scenography.

 The image subjects of Eckehard Fuchs float between memory, fantasy and perceptions created by the sub consciousness, fathom interpersonal impressions, disturbed communication and blurred behavioural patterns. 

While in his former works the human figure, linked with narrative borrowings and formal benefits across the history of art, formed to a central motif, his new works inherit a navigation across the human psyche, whereas the image findings leave the concreteness and oscillate between subtle and dazzling colouring. That and the title of the exhibition »ordine ordinario«, an everyday order, stand in a direct connection to the current life situation of the artist, who has left his habitual work surroundings and works in different European cities rotating every one to three months.

The exhibition »Gorbatshow III« was originally created for off-spaces and has been present in those. Now this project will be shown within a commercial gallery space for the first time. The initiators Nicolás Dupont, Moritz Liebig, Matthias Materne and Matti Schulz have expanded the list of participating artist by Andrey Klassen and Stefan Krauth for this third issue of the show. The artists show works in different media combined to one big party show, whereupon the party itself will find a surprising early ending for the visitors in it's proverbial sense.

Drawing is Christian Schwarzwald’s artistic medium. He uses different techniques and image sources that are phrased to a new image language within the drawing. The works of Schwarzwald are similar to a sign system. In his space filling installations of drawings that build from drafts and graphic notes, the artist uses individual drawings like bricks for his own system of language and thus claims next to the overall view a discussion of detail of each individual drawing. For the current exhibition »Heap« the artist examined countless individual sheets of the same measurements and investigated their communication and compatibility with each other. After he had messed the sheets all up again about 60 works remained. The presentation in a strict circular tape tempts the viewer to read a story in the heterogenic motifs of linear patterns, organic structures and items or to follow some logic. But as always Schwarzwald counts on illusion and irritation.

 …Julius Hofmann doesn’t illustrate invented stories. He portrays what is inside him: doubt and fear, possible danger and threats, and he plays with temptations, metamorphoses and masquerades. His stories come into being during painting, and are made with brushes and paint, and also with saws, cutters, cardboard, glue or on the computer. Their meaning changes, is expanded or deleted, often faster than they came into being. Julius Hofmann is a filmmaker. He’s a filmmaker, but above all he’s an actor, a make-up artist, a set designer, a cameraman, a editor, a sound engineer and director, all in one. His films, though few, are nevertheless of high quality, and compact in an oppressive way, just like his paintings, which look like condensed films. It is implied that things have happened and that afterwards anything is possible. A road to a dark forest, water that is devoured by the night, a shadow kingdom behind a wall. The young artist appears to have left behind trails, tempting us to look at something…

The most prominent character in the paintings and films is a man with a dog mask. The mask makes him both invisible and acts as a protective helmet, to combat villains and to suffer together with prisoners. Murderers appear too, but they already show the face of death. Femininity looks like cast porcelain and mobile technology is indispensable for the image world of the painter and sculptor. Here, he is a man of his time. But he is also someone who tests the designer’s harmonies and looks for the boundaries of destruction…

Bernd Sikora

Paola Alborghetti, Ulf Aminde, Tina Beifuss, Laura Bielau, Theo Boettger, Benedikt Braun, Hannes Broecker, Jan Brokof, Laura Bruce, David Buob, Stefanie Busch, Ayelen Coccoz, Stuart Croft, Constanze Deutsch, Isabelle Dutoit, Eckehard Fuchs, Tino Geiß, Kerstin Gottschalk, Falk Haberkorn, Hans Hemmert, Sebastian Hempel, Philipp Hennevogl, Andreas Hildebrandt, Julius Hofmann, Franka Hörnschemeyer, Gabriela Jolowicz, Lisa Junghanß, Anne Kaminsky, Eric Keller, Alfons Knogl, Peter K. Koch, Tobias Köbsch, Juliane Köhler, Stefan Krauth, Stefan Kübler, Anja Langer, Stefan Lenke, Jonas Lewek, Andreas Lorenschat, Paula Muhr, Erik Niedling, Daniel Rode, Jenny Rosemeyer, Christoph Rossner, Sophia Schama, Marten Schech, Oskar Schmidt, Ryan Schneider, Christian Schönwälder, Claudia Schötz, Christian Schwarzwald, Robert Seidel, Tommy Støckel, Katja Stoye Cetin, Jade Townsend, Patrick Ward, Anne Wenzel, Martina Wolf, Gabriele Worgitzki