Claus Goedicke photographs objects that are as ele- mentary as they are essential for our everyday life— light bulb, soap, band aid, hammer, pencil…—and basic foodstuffs: bread, butter, eggs, carrots, meat… Things that we see and hold in our hands almost everyday, but that are so commonplace that we barely notice them. He presents the objects singly, frontally, up close, and in even daylight that accentuates their plasticity. Unlike commercial photography, which uses similar means, the objects do not appear to be immaculate or brand new. Their limpid beauty stems from their straightforward functionality and signs of wear. Carefully chosen backdrops, which themselves show signs of wear and tear—crumpled, scratched, and yellowed—lend the objects their own identity, a back story, and the photographs a certain portrait character. The images give us an idea of the importance that objects hold for us. Back in 1955 Walker Evans captured the charm emanating from such banal things in his series Beauties of the Common Tool, about which he said: »A hardware store is a kind of offbeat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear ›undesigned‹ forms.«
Claus Goedicke, born in 1966, studied photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, from 1995 as a master student of Bernd Becher. In spring 2017, the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop is exhibiting about 70 of his photographs taken between 2007 and 2015.
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Sage Paris
1 bis, avenue de Lowendal, 75007 Paris, France
November 30, 2017 to January 27, 2018
