Hans Könings / Eva Schwab / SpringerParker
ERINNERUNGSRAUM 01: Fotografie-Derivate

September 15  - October 13, 2010
Opening of the Petra Rietz Salon Gallery

Since March 2006, exhibitions, discussions, debates, correspondence, publications and ideas about artistic projects, have been circulating in the Salon. Their binding theme is memory. With time this theme has given birth to its own genre: Derivative photography – works that concern themselves with private, personal and alien, photographic found pieces and, by transformations in the most diverse fashions, leave behind the medium of photography.

For the opening of the Petra Rietz Salon Gallery, the exhibition ERINNERUNGSRAUM O1: Fotografie-Derivate (MEMORY ROOM ONE: Derivative photography) presents an extract from the work of the Salon until now. Three artists are being shown that deal in a very personal fashion with historical photographic material, transforming it and as such researching the theme of memory, so integral to photography. In this, they leave the medium of photography behind themselves – in the spirit of how Ludwig Wittgenstein described the process of gaining understanding: You have to throw away the ladder after you've climbed up it.

In the joint display of Hans Köning's drawings Berliner Männer (Berlin Men), Eva Schwab's painted ‘after-images’ and the video still Girlfriend so Purple by SpringerParker, the transformative potential of the theme of memory is revealed.

The artists and works exhibited:

Hans Könings, Berliner Männer (Berlin Men), drawings
The Dutch artist Hans Könings uses found photographic material as a point of departure for his working process. For Berliner Männer (Berlin Men) he has digitally scanned photos of men – and only men - hailing from or found in Berlin and enlarged them on his computer to almost life size. From these microscopically detailed versions of the materials, Könings makes drawings which are then once again photographed and scanned, enlarged and worked over using all the methods of digital image production. With this, the processing of the source materials is being brought from second to third generation technology: Hans Könings makes linoleum cuts that, printed on pure black and white, assume the pre-photographic quality of the original snap shots and lend them a most personal signature. In ERINNERUNGSRAUM 01, drawings from this process are being shown.

Eva Schwab, Nachbilder (After-images), paintings
Through the scrutinizing of stereotypical private photo album scenes, the artist calls up images and memories that she translates, expands and dissects onto paper and canvas. The artist raises questions about the reality content of memories in general and of photographs in particular. The usage of wax in painting is to ensure the translucence of different layers interfering with each other. Thus, Eva Schwab mines for new images, always making an attempt to shape the past for the present. In ERINNERUNGSRAUM 01, three works are shown which allow this working method, reminiscent of a palimpsest, to be seen.

SpringerParker, Girlfriend so Purple, photography
The artwork Girlfriend so Purple is an art and sound installation based on photographs of the most heterogeneous origin. Out of an electrifying immersion of psychedelic sounds, the likeness of a woman in luminous warm purple appears, only to vanish again before she can be fully processed. The sounds swell into a powerful torrent that sweeps the viewer along into a sequence of new images. As the border between the personal and the external blurs, access to a collective ‘picture memory’ discloses itself to us. The installation is represented by a video still in ERINNERUNGSRAUM 01.