An exhibition of works by Neo Rauch and photographs by Roger Ballen, André Gelpke, Ralph Gibson, Duane Michals, Vera Lehndorff, Holger Trülzsch and Arthur Tress.
Painting invents, photography discovers. It is often in those terms that the two media are weighted and juxtaposed. Such a stance belies a belief in the authenticity of photography as opposed to the willful mingling of illusion and reality in painting.
Among the most important international artists of his generation, Neo Rauch has perfectly mastered this game. The native Leipziger, born 1960, understands painting as “the continuation of a dream by other means” and thus gives us an essential clue to his work. Rauch’s neo-surrealism thrives on constructed dream worlds. We recognize displaced scraps of reality, but they have been combined anew and encrypted. In doing so Rauch seems to suggest particular interpretations yet simultaneously sabotages them with artistic ambiguity.
The exhibition Traumwelten – In the Court of the King of Dreams, curated by Freddy Langer (FAZ), contrasts the absurd chimera of the painter, illustrator, and sculptor from the collection of entrepreneur Professor Hans Georg Näder and other private collections with photographs in which the world is no less cryptic than in Rauch’s oversized phantasmagoria. For the first time Neo Rauch’s oeuvre has been placed in fruitful dialogue with the works of international photographers of the 1970s and 1980s who stand for poetic and arcane interpretations of reality: Roger Ballen, André Gelpke, Ralph Gibson, Duane Michals, Vera Lehndorff & Holger Trülzsch, and Arthur Tress. These images, too, open up an alien and inscrutable world.
Photography has also always strived to create images beyond the bounds of reality. With surrealism photographic artists discovered that nothing is more puzzling or disturbing than a carefully depicted object or a situation taken out of context. Exactly photography’s precision charges the world with a bizarre magic and alienates it, just like in a dream in which the images become all the more confusing the more distinctly we seem to recognize them.
The wrong object in the wrong place, a strange perspective, an incomprehensible gesture is all it takes for the world to come apart at the seams. Roger Ballen transports us to the labyrinth of a boarding house inhabited by lunatics, while Arthur Tress captures moments of grim fairy tales; Ralph Gibson overlays scenes and still lifes with nightmarish moments, and André Gelpke, through his cropping, infuses everyday situations with a sense of danger. In his multipart visual narratives, Duane Michals tells of being lost; Vera Lehndorff & Holger Trülzsch paint the body of their model so that she disappears equally in nature as well as before the façade of a dilapidated factory.
The Kunsthalle GHN was founded in late 2011 as a new exhibition space in southern Lower Saxony. Some 7,000 visitors viewed the inaugural exhibition of František Drtikol and Helmut Newton from the HGN Collection and other significant private collections. The pieces by Neo Rauch on view in the upcoming Traumwelten have also been provided by the HGN Collection and other private collectors for this exclusive public showing. The photographs have been provided by the respective artists.
Traumwelten – In the Court of the King of Dreams
August 23 – November 25, 2012
Kunsthalle HGN
Karl Wünstefel Weg
Duderstadt
Germany
Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 11 am – 6 pm
Free admission
Contact : Susanne Grieshaber, [email protected] and [email protected]
