OLIVER KREBS | colours we breathe

Opening: Friday 09 January 2015, 7 pm

Exhibition: 10 January – 07 February 2015

Finissage: Friday 06 February 2015, 2–8 pm

Images from the outback of our self

The photographs by Oliver Krebs document fictional moments in an everyday reality; his snapshots capture found moments which are carefully staged. This is not for them to become theatrically elevated or monumentalized, much less to claim for authenticity. For the photographer they form an outback of our self. Leaving design behind. What remains is some sober directness.

The people appearing here are difficult to discern, are only halfway present. Almost always they occupy anonymous-seeming transit spaces which for the most part defy more precise definition. In a visual language informed by architectural detail, passersby, reflections, shadows, and light are brought together by visual axes, and are set in relation to one another, if only for one moment, in the eye of the beholder, and in the image by the photographer. Exposures of silhouettes behind dirty window, of shadows cast by proliferating vegetation, of the play of light on crumpled plastic sheeting or siding panels with the gaps in between creating an ever so slightly irregular grid pattern, are of near provocative casualness.

Yet within combinations of such type, and notwithstanding any utter banality about them, a subjective perception can be reconstructed which is trained by a painterly examination of the visual environment. As in the case with the view through a drape onto a rocket: the artist incorporates different and opposing planes into his pictures and combines both arbitrary and constructed events into complex visual compositions. Therein thematic fields emerge exploring dissolution and subjectivity by way of the interplay of physical and symbolic boundaries within contemporary urban space.