WERNER HUTHMACHER | Scape

Opening: Friday, 30 October 2009, 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 31 October - 21. November 2009

 

We are pleased to invite you to the second solo exhibition by Werner Huthmacher at the Loris Gallery. The photographic installation Scape, which was created in Peking in 2008, is being shown in Germany for the first time. Scape describes the attempt to delve into existing photographic images of urban space and to grasp them as part of reality. 

Pictures were also taken in the real city and explore the origins of the found images in the same manner. The installation presents the pictures as conterminous, making it difficult to decipher whether the picture in question is merely a reproduction or originally a genuine space. 

In the urban centres of the West, vast photographic tarpaulins – apart from their obvious use as advertising space – are either used to illustrate existing buildings for the duration of their restoration, preserving the familiar landscape of the area, or to indicate what might be constructed in similar dimensions on the same spot. Here the genuine surface disappears, leaving nothing more than the attempt of the image surface to represent physicality. Peking, where the rapid change in recent years has altered the structure of the city, rarely goes to this type of expense. In fact, the envisaged project is typically built with such speed that reproduction in similar dimensions as a screen would hardly be worth the effort. 

Hence the reasons for such photographic tarpaulins can differ radically. Behind the portrayal of conventional urban or park scenery is the attempt to achieve a greater functionality of the “fake”. The aim is to give the city a more “dense” appearance. What happens behind these photographic walls remains concealed. The old city frequently disappears behind them, not yet replaced by new buildings. The ordinary gestures of the figures depicted in these photographic landscapes reinforce the credibility of the illusion. 

This contemporary method of creating illusions, in particular the attempt to recreate space authentically on image surfaces, is a specifically barock motif, one that finds a novel form of representation here.