Ideas grow, cities grow, plants grow. This year the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation is dedicating its summer exhibition, titled Urban Growths, to a surprising aspect of contemporary photography. The group show brings together six contemporary positions in photography dedicated to the complex theme of plants in the city.
With Urban Growths. Positions in Contemporary Plant Photography the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation is continuing its series of exhibitions featuring contemporary photographers, who—in keeping with Alfred Ehrhardt’s thematic focus—examine nature and the construction of the natural.
Dürer’s works Das große Rasenstück (The Great Turf) and Akelei (The Columbine) are each shown in large tableaus of carefully arranged book reproductions. These compositions are not without irony in the way they draw on the traditional images and projected notions of plants in urban “cultural space.” Annabelle Fürstenau offers a surgical view of the floral world. Her photographs are the result of a laborious process of dissecting individual flowers and plants, in which their fragile components laid out in sequence according to shape and size. For the viewer such systems of organization evoke both a painful and aestheticizing distance to objects at hand. The work is a radical investigation on the elements precisely defining contemporary plant species.
Claudia Angelmaier, Das große Rasenstück, 2004/2008 © Claudia Angelmaier
A series of photographs by Claudia Fährenkemper serves as a form of medial reassurance. The vertical-format images consist of photograms, which were exposed in the sun directly at the site where the plants were found. Life-sized motifs remain on the image carrier and have a bizarre coloration. Fährenkemper consciously positions the print-like quality of the photogram between anachronism and modernity. Finally, the two photographs by Ralph Samuel Grossmann have an arresting, signal-like appearance. The floral has returned to the vase in these explicitly pared-down images. An artistic attempt at domestication, so it seems, which obviously wishes to explore color abstraction in plant form. In these works urban growths stand alone as objects, but not as objects of projection.
Participating artists: Claudia Angelmaier, Nina Ebbinghaus, Claudia Fährenkemper, Annabelle Fürstenau, Ralph Samuel Grossmann, and Helmut Völter.
Profile
The ALFRED EHRHARDT STIFTUNG is committed to promoting the study of the work of Alfred Ehrhardt, a photographer, documentary filmmaker and outstanding representative of the New Objectivity movement. The foundation was established in November 2002 by the artist’s son, the Munich investment manager Dr. Jens Ehrhardt, in order to preserve his father’s artistic legacy and estate—which includes drawings, graphic works, photographs, negatives, films and papers—and make it available to a wide public. In January 2010 the foundation moved from Cologne to Berlin, a step made to enhance the foundation’s public presence.
www.alfred-ehrhardt-stiftung.de
