Solo show. A selection of 30 photographs, some large-format, from Niedling's current series Formation. The images show plants, blossoms, tools and the everyday life of garden production.
The Frankfurt Gallery ROTHAMEL is showing new works of the photographer, Erik
Niedling from 30th November 2007 to 5th January 2008. A selection of photographs
from Niedling's current series FORMATION will be presented.
The 30 images, some large-format, avail themselves of a legacy long lost until Erik
Niedling rediscovered it: an archive of thousands of glass negatives from the period
between the two world wars. If they were produced for order catalogues of the well
established Erfurter nursery Kakteen-Haage or if the owner, the globetrotter and
botanic scholar, Walther Haage felt challenged by Albert Renger-Patzsch, can no
longer be determined.
The images show plants, blossoms, tools and the everyday life of garden production.
Their sober visual language clearly allude to Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt,
who at the same time established the New Objectivity as a groundbreaking, new style
of photography.
Erik Niedling forgoes directly manipulating the material and subjects it instead to
an elaborate reviewing process. The results are, nevertheless, totally new images,
that differ from the originals in a paradoxical manner thus, that they end up
reproducing the originals. The photographic carrier of information the negative
itself - becomes the object in Erik Niedling's new work.
"Erik Niedling succeeds in creating something wonderful and at the same time highly
alienating: he forces the aesthetic-epistemological programme out of the New
Objectivity photographs and leaves them in an idiosyncratic twilight in the
hauntingly beautiful and darkly luminous light of photography. And in this light,
our cultural history begins to shine anew." (Bernd Stiegler)
Erik Niedling lives and works in Berlin. A catalogue with texts from Ingo Niermann
und Bernd Stiegler (Schaden-Verlag) and accompanying his new work, FORMATION will be
available.
Opening: Friday 30 November 8pm
Galerie Rothamel
Fahrgasse 17 - Frankfurt
Free admission