In a new exhibition the Essen GAM / Obrist Gallery shows photographs of Helge Emmaneel. The Hamburg based artist employs techniques of simplification in his photography.
He deliberately uses an old camera from the sixties, an Agfa Click with a single shutter speed and few aperture settings. This outmoded tool allows him to give his pictures a sensorially visionary charge simply through multiple exposure.
It’s important to realise that Emmaneel works with analogue processes, so image composition takes place only in the moment the photograph is taken. The artist is active in selecting the motif and the details, while the camera plays its part in the abstraction of the motif. Emmaneel eschews digital modification of the image in post production; rather, he prefers to leave part of the process of artistic conception to chance, which is determined by the often unpredictable processes in the camera mechanism and on photographic paper.
The acts of entering and experiencing nature are fundamental themes of Helge Emmaneel’s work. He gives presentiments of landscape; he shows us just enough so that a coastline or a forrest, a field or a figure is recognisable, at the frontier to transfiguration. This work expresses a longing for a landscape that no longher exists in this form. Due to their lack of explicitness his landscapes become archetypical images of longing for a natural world that we feel we have already lost.
Helge Emmaneel was born 1969 in Essen, and now lives and works in Hamburg. Kettler editors in Bönen recently published a monography titled “Helge Emmaneel: Photographien 2001-2007” (ISBN 978-3-941100-38-1).
Exhibition title: Helge Emmaneel. Photography.
Exhibition time: 20 February – 4 April, 2009
Opening reception: Friday, 20 February, 2009, 7 pm
The gallery, founded in 2000 in Essen, Germany, is now situated very close to the Museum Folkwang. The emphasis is on dealing and communicating of contemporary painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. In continual and personal collaboration with the artists the gallery conveys their work in regular single exhibitions, publications and fairs.
GAM | Galerie Obrist
Torsten Obrist and Juri Czyborra
Kahrstraße 59
D-45128 Essen / Germany
[email protected]
www.gam-essen.de
phone +49 (0)201 72 66 203
fax: +49 (0)201 72 66 204
