"Gute Aussichten": Young German artists put on a show
Rexroth challenges the boundary between city and country with Trees of the City
(photo by Florian Rexroth)
By Rebecca Park, Contributor
On display through September 2 at the Goethe Institute, “gute aussichten-young german photographers” allows American audiences to get a glimpse of what’s happening in contemporary German art circles. The annual travelling show, now in its fifth year, culls its exhibitors from a competition among graduate photography students. This year’s batch of artists explores diverse themes with common threads hidden deep underneath.
The nine photographers featured draw inspiration from a full spectrum of subjects. Laura Bielau explored the darkroom and its mysteries while Katrin Trautner examined the intricacies of old-age intimacy with her series Morgenliebe/Morninglove. Maziar Moradi and Reza Nadji took two different approaches to the same subject (Iran) one studying its people, the other, its buildings. But some basic unifying trends do emerge.
Above all, there’s the element of performance, that postmodern mixing of preconceived boundaries. It’s done both for a laugh, like with Markus Georg’s Die Macht Der Bilder-The Power of Images that playfully recreates famous monuments, or to create a bit of anarchistic havoc with our unsuspecting eyes, which is what Florian Rexroth does with his staged, dislocated arbor portraits Bäume Der Stadt-Trees of the City. Rexroth straddles the border with minimalism, draping blankets of white to erase any context from his natural moments. Other artists, such as Sarah Strassmann, also embraced the minimalist ideal, preferring flat planes of color that transform empty hallways into abstract wonderlands.
Moradi, taking on the multicultural theme that also makes multiple appearances in the show, made the strongest impression of all the photographers exhibited with his series 1979. Of Iranian descent, he imagines the life of his family during the Islamic Revolution and the succeeding eight-year Iraq-Iran war, and all the tensions and terror that history implies. Particularly powerful was a portrait of an older woman draped in a black hijab, blowing in the wind. The hilly background, the intimate close-up of her worn eyes, the mystery of the billowing black, transported the viewer to the land of this singular woman’s outer trouble and inner turmoil. But, as with all young artists, he had his weaker moments. Interior scenes took on a more staged quality, as a woman dropping a pile of oranges had too much of a metaphorical feel to be truly natural and moving.
“Just the facts” could easily be the slogan of this year’s “gute aussichten” competition. The artists on display, with their staged, minimalist tableaux, tend to be more concerned with dry presentations of the world before attentive political discourse. Where’s the unique German soul? Well-constructed and intellectually committed but, for the most part, without real passion and emotional engagement, these German photographs prove further what has long been a creeping suspicion: art school has gone international.
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