Komponente, HGB Gallery, Leipzig, 2019
KOMPONENTE (2019)
Components are segments of a whole, but can also be autonomous, standing for themselves. They represent both, the whole and its individual parts. At the same time, they are a cell and an entire body. Likewise, concrete is a building
material consisting of components: sand, water and cement.
Combining these single elements with each other leads to a compound. Regular formwork defines basic shapes of the initially liquid concrete. It defines its character and inscribes itself into the surface of the material. What is left is the negative of a positive.
Working with formwork is about returning to the basic shapes of architecture, of geometry – or mathematical sign systems.
At the same time, these moulds create a kind of architecture en miniature, evoking the high-rise buildings of classical modernism, the creations of Le Corbusier or of Oscar Niemeyer. Formwork is a connected system: as a single object, it refers to the entire system of a building and within even the smallest part, we find an embodiment of the whole construction. At the same time, a striking ambivalence between room and surface comes to the foreground, a graphic abstraction which has interested me for a long time in my photography.
My starting point was to examine these moulds as positive and negative constructions,
expressing the principle of transmission of the one into the other: as an imprint of the formwork shell into its concret counterpart. I am fascinated by this process well known from printing and sculpture, of course, but also from analogue
photography, where a reflection of the world inscribes itself, through light, into the emulsion of the film. So it is also about the Idea of a trace, relicts that evidence much earlier actions, surviving through their materialization in a new medium.
