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Christian Gieraths |
The Baukunst Galerie opens on Wednesday, the 18th of June 2008 from 7 to 9 p.m. ”Urban Stills“ – a large solo-exhibition of works by the German photographer Christian Gieraths. Dr. Stefan Gronert, curator at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, will give an introduction in his artistic œuvre. Thus it is the first exhibition of this artist at the gallery an accented selection of c-prints and pigment prints will demonstrate the width of his young but very copious photographic work.
Christian Gieraths, born in 1976 in Cologne, studied art history, philosophy and cultural sciences from 1999 to 2005 and afterwards fine art at the Art Academy in Münster in the class of Ulrich Erben. In 2001 he started parallel studies at the Art Academy Düsseldorf in the photography class of Thomas Ruff. After his exam and his master year overseen by Daniele Buetti he was awarded with the first prize of the GWK Subsidy Award of Fine Art by the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Westfälischen Kulturarbeit. The Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History in Münster took that award as a cause to devote him a large solo-exhibition entitled “Cityscapes” from 2006 to 2007, which was accompanied by an eclectic catalogue. Furthermore in 2006 his photos were also shown together with works by artists as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Boris Becker and Jürgen Klauke in the touring exhibition “Fotokunst aus 60 Jahren“ in the Museum of the City of Ratingen, the Flottmann-Hallen in Herne and the Galerie Münsterland in Emsdetten. This year until the 10th of August his current series “pastime paradise“ is presented at the RWE-Tower in Dortmund.
Christian Gieraths travels to cities all over the world and names his series after those towns. Thereby he is especially interested in those, which bear traces of historical, political or aesthetic change: The cure and bathing resort Sochi, which he visited for his first series in 2000, has already been a spa of the czardom in the 19th century. Under the rules of the Sovjet it was rebuilt to an ideological charged ideal world and at last in the course of the globalization it was provided with an infrastructure as measured by American standards. Similar alterations excited him at the perambulated Bukarest in 2002, where the communistic dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu demolished whole areas of the Old Town, in order to raise a monument for himself in the form of the “Palace of the Republic“. Such processes of transformation can also be detected in Havanna (2004) with its ruinous colonial pomp and the monuments of the Cuban revolution as well as in Cape Town (2004) where the economic improvements are a long time coming after the end of the apartheid in spite of all the rehabilitation programs. In Tokyo (2005) it is the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity that evoked his interest. In the West of the United States the rapid development of the real estate speculations and of the entertainment industry in Hollywood and Las Vegas inspired the artist to his latest series “pastime paradise“ (2006).
The touristy voyeurism is not gratified by the works of Christian Gieraths, nor interests in sociological or ethnological contents. Thus his images show documentary aspects, the toured cities are first and foremost vehicles to search for breaks and tendencies of alienation and exchangeability. The single photo is not only a part of a series, but should also be considered as an autonomous image. The titles “Hauseingang (Entrance)“, “Rote Stühle (Red Chairs)“, “Schwimmbad (Swimming Pool)“ or “Sprungturm (Diving Platform)“ refer to alleged exchangeable indoor and outdoor spaces. By cutting out and formalizing certain areas the artist finds an indirect access to the toured cities.
These distillates of his subjective access to a city (“Urban Still“) improve the interaction of perception, view and idea. They impress in an unspectacular and calm way by their almost typographical composed areas with minimal shifts of shades and structure. In contrast to Becher student Candida Höfer Christian Gieraths does not exclude emotion and expression from his pictures, but generates them in form of atmosphere. The expressive coloring and illumination of his analogue photos is due to the artist’s longtime experiments with filters, films and photographic paper. The artist exclusively works with preexisting light – in indoor rooms it can last up to a minute until he closes the aperture. Free from the standardization of our perception by trivialized stereotypes he opens up spaces of vision and negates the narrative in aid of a controlled construction of the tonal values of light and color. In this process his photos sometimes gain a cinematic quality reminding of films by David Lynch. Though above all it is the sensitivity and sensuality of a pictorial eye, that Christian Gieraths joins with photographic precision and surface treatment in an inimitable way.
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