Strange? Remarkable!
Photographs from the BLMK Collection
14/03—31/05/26
Claus Bach, Gerd Bonfert, Kurt Buchwald, Klaus Elle, VALIE EXPORT, Katja Eydel, Thomas Florschuetz, Andreas Gefeller, Stefan Heyne, Joachim Jansong, York der Knöfel, Matthias Leupold, Ulrich Lindner, Steffen Mertens, ORLAN, Marc Räder, Michael Schade, Hans-Christian Schink, Erasmus Schröter, Klaus Wittkugel, Edwin Zwakmann
This exhibition focuses on photographic works that may strike the viewer as strange, that make them pause. Images that significantly unsettle us sometimes force us to stop and look more closely. They can evoke unease and wonder, but also amazement and curiosity. All of this, in turn, leads to a deeper engagement with the image and stimulates reflection.
The selected photographers deliberately break with our expectations and (visual) experiences—for example, through unusual perspectives, extreme close-ups, or absurd image compositions. Likewise, several of them question social norms or taboos, thus creating a feeling of unease or uncertainty in the viewer. Using overexposure, blurring, long exposures, multiple exposures, chemical manipulations in the darkroom, or digital distortions, the photographers disrupt the familiar „fidelity to reality“ in photography. Thus, the question of deception and truth resonates in all the works. Sometimes the images are staged, hovering between reality and fiction; sometimes they are photomontages or collages, combining multiple images to create a new, often surreal, visual world.
The range of subjects explored by the individual photographers is wide: they depict everyday situations and objects, dedicate themselves to portraiture, and also to landscapes. What unites them all, however, is their deliberate use of provocation, which gives their images a powerful emotional impact, ensuring that the photographs linger in the memory and become memorable. The exhibition also demonstrates how artists of different generations repeatedly use the medium of photography to disrupt visual conventions and raise pressing social issues.
Texts about the artists
1st floor
Gerd Bonfert
The works of Gerd Bonfert erase what most artists seek in their self-portraits: their own gaze, their own face. In the photograph „80-17,“ a skull bone is visible where the head should be; the index and middle fingers of the right hand, resting white on the black suit, suggest a gesture of blessing. This staging of his own transience thus acquires an almost sacred quality. In the portrait „D 77-1,“ the sole subject is disappearance itself. The black space absorbs the male figure dressed in black. The blurred white face appears as if erased. Gerd Bonfert is not seeking a new perspective on himself, but goes a step further, imagining the transition to another sphere by evoking classical vanitas imagery from Baroque art.
Klaus Elle
With his works in the series „Illuminations,“ photographer Klaus Elle presents surreal views that exist in a strange space between reality and fiction. Instead of faithfully depicting reality, he creates his own images, achieved through long exposures, multiple exposures, and the skillful use of a flashlight. He illuminates parts of bodies and spaces, photographs them, and gradually combines the illuminated areas to form a new reality. The resulting images are reminiscent of 19th-century ghost paintings or give the impression of capturing something that doesn’t actually exist.
VALIE EXPORT
From the early to mid-1970s, VALIE EXPORT explored the representation of body postures as expressions of inner states through drawing, photography, and performance art. These two images belong to her well-known series „Body Figurations,“ in which EXPORT places female bodies—usually her own—in spatial relation to urban architecture or nature. The body takes on existing forms, and black ink overpainting often emphasizes the spatial situation. Through imitation, the artist examines and internalizes her environment, following the motto that one gains insights by adopting a different perspective.
Thomas Florschuetz
From the mid-1980s onward, Thomas Florschuetz explored his own body experimentally in his photographic work. He presents it in unusual views, almost as if it had been explosively shattered, distorted perspectively, and fragmented. Head, arms, hands, and other body parts are captured against a white background, with the self-timer camera recording the artist’s facial expressions and gestures. The individual photographs are composed into multi-part, associative image installations. The interplay of the individual sequences conveys a human image that radiates inner turmoil, anguish, and despair.
ORLAN
On every magazine cover, every advertisement, we see faces composed of the modules of traditional taste. The face as a medium for generating collective identity. ORLAN, too, constantly reassembles her face in her photographic work. However, she doesn’t attempt to recreate an ideal in the conventional sense. Using digital image editing, she pulls and tugs at her face, alters proportions, dyes skin and hair in vibrant colors, and adds new elements. These images appear monstrous because they defy the universal physiognomy that is otherwise ubiquitous.
2nd floor
Kurt Buchwald
For Kurt Buchwald, the forest is not a place of longing where romantic pictorial traditions are perpetuated. His twelve-part tableau unites found fragments of reality, which, in their combination, create a latently threatening, ambivalent atmosphere. Through the carefully considered arrangement of the individual photographs, a multi-layered network of associations emerges. If one follows Buchwald’s visual clues, traces, and signals, the black-and-white images, in their combination, subtly generate an oppressive and unsettling atmosphere.
Katja Eydel
The work alludes to the oil painting of the same name by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from 1559, which depicts the customs of Carnival and Lent. The setting is Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Market stalls, beer stands, and temporary soccer fields speak of the appropriation of the square by the population, but also of leisure culture. The artist expands the scene with inserted details such as marketing stands and Chinese tour groups, so that reality becomes a staged performance. The photograph is overlaid with a gray-tinted transparency film, which has been cut out in some areas, allowing the unfiltered photograph to emerge in its original color.
Andreas Gefeller
Seeing the familiar and ubiquitous in a surprisingly different light is one of the fundamental intentions of photographer Andreas Gefeller. In his series “Supervisions,” Gefeller (re)discovers unusual perspectives on the quite familiar. With a camera mounted on a two-meter-high tripod, the artist systematically walks across pre-selected areas of interest, carefully “scanning” their surfaces. Gefeller then digitally assembles the resulting individual shots into a large composite image. This digital montage appears to be a bird’s-eye view, which, upon closer inspection—not least due to minute traces of optical distortion—proves impossible.
Marc Räder
Marc Räder has explored the popular holiday island of Mallorca several times with his camera. In doing so, he investigates how the massive impact of package tourism is leaving its mark on the island. In Räder’s photographs, the Mediterranean holiday paradise transforms into a miniature landscape, reminiscent of model railway layouts, as he primarily photographs from a great distance and usually from an elevated vantage point. This contributes to the effect of miniaturization, transforming reality into a toy world. Räder further enhances this model-like quality by interspersing his images with blurred focus.
Erasmus Schröter
In 1989, while waiting for the ferry to England in Calais, Erasmus Schröter first discovered bunkers of the Atlantic Wall on the beach. He subsequently sought out the remnants of this gigantic fortification and staged them in spectacular photographs at dusk or at night. Using elaborate lighting with numerous spotlights fitted with different colored gels, he bathes the massive concrete monoliths and their surroundings in an alienating light. The scenes illuminated by colored artificial light, featuring relics from the Second World War, appear unsettling and enigmatic. Schröter creates a new perceptual situation by staging visible reality with theatrical means, in which the objects depicted undergo an unexpected reinterpretation.
Edwin Zwakman
A massive motorway interchange cuts through the landscape. From the perspective of an airplane, the viewer surveys the outskirts of a city on the North Sea coast. The photograph is sepia-toned, giving it the appearance of an old military reconnaissance document. Zwakman’s landscape scenes are borrowed from self-constructed models that seem to approximate reality more closely than actual reality itself. Yet the strange perspective exposes reality as a beautiful illusion, a sham, created, as in the cinema, by the film set.