Galerie Reinhard Hauff is pleased to announce the opening of „the light, the shape & the body“ with works by Özlem Altin, Talia Chetrit and Bernhard Kahrmann. The group show concentrates on artists operating according to a set of terms that diverge from those commonly used to understand the medium of photography. Light and shadow, space and form constitute in the works on show the aesthetic coordinates of the organisation of the individual image surfaces, where the primacy of the visible generates an unsettling coexistence between two-dimensional reproduction and spatial arrangement. In today’s discourse around photography and its basic formal language, new ideas focus on using photography as a medium whose properties can be enhanced and placed in dialogue with those of other media. Assembling found / appropriated images in tableau-like diagram works result in a re-contextualisation of the pictorial image contents. Technical manipulation of image information through experimentation with different chemical development and print processes characterize another range of approaches, which include the preference for anachronistic analogue, hand made prints.

The New York artist Talia Chetrit, born in 1982, develops in her meticulously composed still lifes a complex set of references to Constructivist photography of the 1920’s, to historical advertisement images of the 1960’s, and to the school of Surrealist depiction of the female body in photography. In a seemingly simple composition - for instance when she photographs an abstract grid structure casting a shadow over a naked backside - she confronts us with the challenge to question what we really see and whether our perception is credible or not. The effect created by the subtle use of different resolutions contributes to an impression that nothing in her compositions actually is what it appears to be at first glance. A large collection of found images of the human body is the point of departure for the works by Berlin artist Özlem Altin (*1977). With her photographic models depicting people with different gestures, postures and movements, she composes typological pictures on which the human body, through avoidance of any personal attributes, is being probed for formal legibility. Occasionally Altin arranges three-dimensional installations, out of copies, photos and drawings in which the formal quality of the reproduced picks up from the spatial quality of the objects. The haptic perception of the support that holds the photographic image also characterizes the new works by the Stuttgart artist Bernhard Kahrmann (*1973), who in his work for quite a while now explores formal structural questions of perception within image production. After having enlarged his own photographic motifs on the computer screen, and printed them in black and white on A3 paper sheets, Kahrmann wallpapers these print-outs together so as to generate a trompe l’oeil play with delicate intersections, overlappings and creases, which makes it difficult for the eye to differentiate between imagined and depicted reality.

Galerie Reinhard Hauff wishes to express its gratitude to the contributing artists, as well as to Circus, Berlin and the Renwick Gallery, New York.