Since the late 1980s, Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968), has evolved as one of the most important artists of his generation, contributing crucial aspects of photography which became redefined as an art form. From the art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia is a long overdue survey exhibition, which includes previously never before seen early drawings and other works from the late 1980s. His earliest works, photocopies of newspaper images and his own photographs, go back to his first experiments with digital black and white photocopiers. Pictures and photo sequences of his friends and of young people from the pop and club culture made him known to a wider public.

Tillmans, who lives in Berlin and London, received in 2000 the prestigious British Turner Prize, the first for a non-UK artist. The breadth of his artistic work includes not only portraits, interiors, landscapes, sky shots and still lifes but also work created in his darkroom without a camera lens. Also, abstract paintings, video works, table installations, magazine articles and materials selected around socio-political issues. His latest digitally recorded images from New World were taken on his travels around the world.

His work has not only developed a new language of photography, but also created its own form of presentation, which are exhibitions dependent on site-specific installations. He developed an exhibition practice that placed next to unframed photographs, photo prints alongside photocopies, inkjet and laser printing format, some fixed some directly on the wall – arranged in complex as well as strictly linear wall installations. This was to become a norm for future generations of artists that adopted a style of unconventional approach to the medium of photography, which Tillmans has questioned continuously and adapted to new image options.

Wolfgang Tillmans offers an overview of his twenty years of work and responds with a precisely developed overall composition based on the specific issues of the former house in which the installation stands.

http://www.kunstsammlung.de/en/discover/exhibitions/wolfgang-tillmans.html

ASX CHANNEL: WOLFGANG TILLMANS

Wolfgang Tillmans – 02.03. – 07.07.2013 – ART HOUSE K21

(Video: Ralph Goertz © IKS Media Archive / art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia)

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Kommingen, 2007

Gerry Johansson “Deutschland” at Swedish Photography, 2013

By Sören Schuhmacher, ASX Germany, April 2013

In 1993 and 2005 to 2012 Gerry Johansson drove through the German countryside, visiting 176 places like Alt Horsbüll, Gelsenkirchen or Solingen. He divided Germany into nine sectors, which he then traveled systematically. Rather than visiting only major cities, Johansson was drawn primarily to small cities with anonymous architecture in rural areas. Each place he visited is represented by only one photograph. The result is a visual encyclopedia of Germany, in tradition of the New Topographic Movement, but far more refreshing than the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

An excerpt of 57 framed black and white photographs of the series “Deutschland” recently hung in the rooms of the Swedish Photography Gallery at Karl-Marx-Allee, the former socialist boulevard. The photographs in the exhibition were placed in alphabetical order by city name, according to the encyclopedic concept and ensuring a neutrality of presentation. Easy to overlook were the slightly illegible captions of city names attached on the concrete floor underneath each photograph. This made it harder to find the starting photograph, which was misleadingly located in the rear area of the gallery. This strategy served as a wake-up call that Gerry Johansson’s small printed photographs require an attentive and accurate look from a close distance and also was a way to make the viewer participate in his work.

Gerry Johansson once explained in an interview, “Sometimes people think, “Fuck, this is really boring,” but the more they look at them, the more they understand that they are fun, in a way. And then they realize that it’s sort of a cultural comment.”

In his exhibitions he encourages the viewer to take his own little walk around and then to stay longer on a picture, perhaps one that is relevant to the viewer, and then continue.

The melancholic photographs are carefully composed and filled with information that is usually overlooked. People are not physically present in his work, rather they are characterized and represented by the environment that they have created for themselves.

In the small-town Much, a mobile house is parked in front of a typical German timbered house. Through the composition and chosen perspective, lines and windows were brought together in a way that natural edges disappeared and merged together in a new construction.

Mohorn, 2006

Or a detached house in Beckum has merged with the factory behind it to become a surreal looking building, where the illusion of the depth of space has become lost.

Gerry Johansson likes to play with geometric structures and lines, which he often superimposes. His meticulous accuracy does not leave anything to chance. He suggests the mindful vision of careful listening.

The exhibition “Deutschland” shows a cross section of German landscapes, industrial sites and buildings, residential streets, storefronts, urban and rural architecture. On the surface the different portrayed places might look similar, but in the deeper layers emerges their specific culture. Gerry Johansson’s own visual language is then the common thread that connects the places together aesthetically and stands as a symbol for a collective socio-cultural identity.

“Deutschland” is following “Pontiac” in the series starting with “Amerika” (1998), “Sverige” (2005), “Kvidinge” (2007) and “Ulan Bator” (2009).

“Deutschland” was published in 2012 by Mack.

Deutschland. 
Photographs by Gerry Johansson.
MACK, 2012.   Cat# ZF185   

Sören Schuhmacher graduated with a diploma in Communication Management from the Design Akademie Berlin and studied photography at Ostkreuz Schule für Fotografie. He runs the blog Lost in Publications and works as a photographer in Berlin, Germany.

ASX CHANNEL: GERRY JOHANSSON

(All rights reserved. Text @ ASX and Sören Schuhmacher. Images @ Gerry Johansson and courtesy of The Swedish Photography Gallery.)

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By Sören Schuhmacher, ASX Berlin, March 2013

For the first time in Germany, C/O Berlin presents a retrospective of the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (1918-2002).

Christer Strömholm . Post Scriptum, is at the same time the last exhibition hosted in the unique spaces of the Postfuhramt.

Roughly 150 vintage black and white prints are presented on two floors, together with contact sheets, work materials, magazines and a documentary. The exhibition is structured by subject matter, such as “Classics”, “Paris, Spain, USA” or “The Friends of Place Blanche”. The chronological sequence plays no role; also none of the photographs have titles, which lets the images speak for themselves. Christer Strömholm was far more interested in images than technique. He coined the term “existing light” and thought that the photographer should immerse him or herself into the environment and become part of the photograph. It is not surprising that right at the beginning of the exhibition, visitors are confronted first with a quote of Christer Strömholm, which underlines his photographical approach:

“Working with the photographic image is my way of living. When I think about it and look at my pictures more closely, they are all – each in its own way – nothing but self-portraits, a part of my life.”

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the series “The Friends of Place Blanche”, which he photographed between 1959 and 1968. He became close friends with the transsexuals around Place Blanche in Paris and started to document their lives in a very personal way. With this series Christer Strömholm was way ahead of his time, because nobody wanted to publish his apparently “offensive” pictures. Only in 1983, 15 years later, the book Les Amies de Place Blanche got published by ETC publishers and quickly became a collector‘s item. With this work he paved the way for Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

The exhibition was curated by Maria Patomella in collaboration with Joakim and Jakob Strömholm, and is a worthy farewell from the old Postfuhramt in Berlin-Mitte.

A retrospective book devised by Joakim Strömholm and Patric Leo has been published by Max Ström Verlag on the occasion of the exhibition.

(All rights reserved. Text @ ASX and Sören Schuhmacher, Images courtesy C/O Berlin)

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