Schaufenster mit Licht

The exhibition Shop Window with Light at the Galerie Kienzle & Gmeiner includes photographic works by the artists Fareed Armaly (New York and Stuttgart), Isa Genzken (Berlin), Rodney Graham (Vancouver, currently in Berlin), and Imi Knoebel (Düsseldorf) and photographs by the photographers Georg Eckelt (Berlin), Fred Hugel (Villingen), and the late Willi Moegle (Leinfelden).

The topic is light as a means of illumination, of finding the truth, of producing objectivity but also of accentuating the darkness, of disguising, and of transfiguration. Hence it is in principle the same aesthetic question that confronts photographers faced with industrial products and artists with everyday objects. In the meanwhile the problem itself has become an occasion for art.

In this sense the photography-based works of Armaly, Genzken, Graham, and Knoebel play with the tensions that only become possible with photography’s incursion into the sphere of art. The works by the photographers, by contrast, result from practice, from programmatic functionalism, and from aesthetic elevation. Only in retrospect does a contemporaneity emerge that transcends the boundaries between the genres.

Within the formal framework of the classical photographic exhibition that Shop Window with Light employs, the strategies and sublimations of the autonomous artist merge with those of the photographer versed in practice.

The very title, Shop Window with Light, thematizes the proximity of gallery and retail business, alluding to shared aspects of commercial presentation and the medium of photography—namely, the manipulation of light to express sensations of tension and space, on the one hand, and the manipulation of light to promote a retail commodity in the light of a certain aesthetic.

A suggestion by Fareed Armaly led to an exhibition that challenges our habits of seeing.