With a pointed selection of the most diverse groups of works, mainly from the last five years, the Haus am Waldsee will provide a multifaceted insight into the work of Thomas Florschuetz from May 2022. The artist, who was awarded the Dorothea von Stetten Art Prize and is also a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, is considered one of the most important representatives of contemporary photography. Florschuetz’s work comprises numerous series characterised by very different subjects and themes. The selection of his pictorial content is often characterised by an approach that emphasises the opposite. The focus of his work is on the gaze and the form of realisation and less on the reproduction of content. The intuitive moment in capturing the respective pictorial objects and scenarios plays the essential role.
Image above: Thomas Florschuetz, Ohne Titel (E.B.) 27, 2016/2021, 183 x 243 cm, C-Print, Courtesy der Künstler und DIEHL, Berlin, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
Thomas Florschuetz, born in Zwickau in 1957, develops projects and pictorial ideas based on his interest in the constant change of bodies and spaces under the premises of light and time. His photographs are pictorial excerpts of that permanent change in which the authentic conditions of the medium of photography always participate.
His thematically stringent groups of works include extensive series of portraits, such as the “Selbstbilder” (Self-Images) and “Körperstücke” (Body Pieces), which were created around the mid-1980s and which the artist developed further over the following ten years. In the second half of the 1990s, series followed, such as the “Flower Pieces” and with “Multiple Entry”, a long-term observation of a window in his studio flat in Kreuzberg at the time, an opening towards elements and forms of architecture as well as public and urban spaces. Following on from this, he created much-acclaimed, mostly large-format photographs that show set pieces of partly world-famous architecture and serve as the central point of departure for the exhibition. From the former Palace of the Republic in Berlin to buildings by Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad and La Jolla to buildings by Oscar Niemeyer in Brasília or Le Corbusier in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad. In a recent group of works, “Elephant’s Breath”, Florschuetz deals with the dismantling of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin-Dahlem. Recent works deal with the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx near Rio de Janeiro.
For Florschuetz, the fascinating thing about photography is its complexity and thus its ability to capture and depict things and at the same time to point beyond this purely depictive aspect. One and the same object is able to change its appearance with each new look and to imprint itself on our imagination in a new way. This is shown, for example, in the series “Glass/Water” created since 2013, in which, as in the early window pictures, the permanent change and appearance of one and the same object is examined in mostly multi-part works.
A wide variety of artistic strategies are employed. From the examination of interior and exterior space, to light, space and time, as well as movement, fragmentation and entanglement, to sophisticated arrangements of the photographs in the exhibition space. Change in general, formal superimpositions in particular, incessantly revealing formal-aesthetic processes and opening up new spaces of thought are essential criteria of Thomas Florschuetz’s characteristic way of working.
Curated by: Dagmar Schmengler, Anna Himmelsbach and Thomas Florschuetz
Catalogue: A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König in spring 2022. Edited / Introduction: Dagmar Schmengler and Anna Himmelsbach. With a text by Eugen Blume. Approx. 64 pages. German/English.
WHEN?
Friday, May 20th – Sunday, August 28th 2022
WHERE?
HAUS AM WALDSEE – INTERNATIONALE KUNST IN BERLIN
Argentinische Allee 30
14163 Berlin-Zehlendorf
Tel.: +49 (0) 30 801 89 35 I
www.hausamwaldsee.de
