03.05.03 - 17.05.03

Franz Lazi | Photography

"For Franz Lazi, photography and film were both mirror and projection of media worlds. His work, which began in the ruins of the Second World War, has a fictious character regardless of whether he was documenting industrial products or architecture, or designing advertising shoots."
(Manfred Schmalriede)

In contribution to the German-Russian cultural encounters 2003/2004, J. J. Heckenhauer Gallery presented for the first time in Germany a selection of photographs by the Russian artist Nadja Kuznetsova.

Claudio Hils portraits the growing mega cities in Asia, Northern and Latin America: the pittoresquely staged sceneries of the city centers with their shopping malls on the one hand, and their exchangeable, banal, desolate and overflowing peripheries with urban wastes and dumps on the other. The camera shows the niches of human survival, the boundaries between a dream world and reality. From the photographer's point of view the complexity becomes a sort of aesthetic order, and the inconspicuous a worthy image.

"One of photography's great virtues, at least from a historian's point of view, is that it is so inextricably lodged in culture and history that it has no option but to tell the truth [...]." Franz Lazi's "photographs are very suggestive pictures, full of the spirit of their times."
(Ian Jeffrey)

The exhibition presented among other works the series "Anabiosis" and "Waiting for a miracle" and was a contribution to the "German-Russian cultural encounters 2003/2004".

The artist's portraits by Jens Liebchen show George Baselitz, Christian Boltanski, Jenny Holzer, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Katharina Sieverding and others with their works in the German Parliament.

"This work is an effort to document and create a portrait of the City. Since I began working on this project, four years ago, the City has evolved rapidly. From Constructionworkers in Living Containers, Teenagers in the Center of the City, found objects on the streets, Cityscapes, Construction sites and moments, I am attempting to show the different layers of the City and the changes which are taking place. It is Berlin the way I see it."
(Esther Levine)

"I take photographs in the centre of Berlin. Streets, houses, facades, interiors, and people who live here and whom I feel close to. Berlin is no longer the city that I grew up in. But what is it now? I am no longer searching for memories. I am composing a picture of today. Everything is revealed, washed up by the waves of change. The ground we are walking on is in constant motion."
(Wiebke Loeper)

The series "SameTime/SamePlace" deals with the essential aspect of the observation in a second order. Through photography Marc Volk transforms the chaos of the contemporaneity into coexistence.

In Belfast Hils started his photographic research of historical traces, whose ambition is to analyze the structures and patterns of thought of the memory. His research conducted him to the city's archives. The results are exciting impressions, which rearrange coherencies.

Vladimir Kuprijanov is one of the best known Russian photographers. His works were shown among others at the Venice Biennial in 1999 and in the exhibition "Berlin/Moskau 1950-2000" in Berlin. With the project "Faith, Love, Hope" the gallery presents two series of Kuprijanov: "Victoria" and "Faith, Love, Hope", both from 2004.

"...thus you recognize it, is the same than it is."

(Parmenides. About Being. Fragments of a Didactic Poem)

"Grit Schwerdtfeger is a silent observer of city parks and football fields, of observation decks and beaches. Her photographs leave much space to the observer's association. This space is, in spite of the colours, formally reduced and described almost in a strict manner. But suddenly, Schwerdtfeger's precise observation becomes a stage setting: The figures in the photographs surprise the viewer with their form of slight details and recall a decisive moment who took place in the past."
(Wiebke Loeper)

"Berlin for the Blue Hour one could portrait a cycle that arose from day to night. Lebeck takes photos in a standing or walking position, preferably on deck of a double Decker or through the rainy windows of a bus. One gets the reflexes that underline his work of the traditional old school of seeing. "One sees much more than if you just stroll around." For him it means to get back in touch with his home town at this exciting turning point between history and future, which so much characterises the new Berlin."
(Hans-Michael Koetzle)

"New York City is a space drowning in anonymous moments and legendary instants. Go ahead. Try to pause them. Grasp them. File them... Levine's New York is a series of colors, ironies and shadows. She paints in minutia, offering inanimates and body parts their 15 seconds."
(Anthony LaSala)

Wismar's Museum of Stadtgeschichte features the Moeglin Collection. The title of Wiebke Loepers newest work follows the fictional idea of reporting from today's Wismar to the sisters of Carl Moeglin.

"Berlin truly politicised Gossage's work. After his first visit to the city, be began to photograph with the darker eye of a forensic archaeologist.

Throughout the 1980s Berlin became Gossage's overriding focus. Berlin, with its Wall, forgotten tracts of land, unwanted histories - both forgotten and remembered - became the place where Gossage discovered the ideas that have come to mark his personalized style of photograhic storytelling. The art from this period is arguable his most important and has unquestionable influenced all his subsequent work."
(Gerry Badger)

In PLAYING FIELDS, Jens Liebchen focus on the silent infrastructure and the peripherical localities of the "New Great Game" - places which are a part of the geopolitical game concerning the distribution of resources in the Caucase and Central Asia.

"Liebchen has attempted to conjure up a metaphor for what is happening in the area, seeking to make visible the invisible by photographing the invisible - or, to more precise, by photographing the nearly invisible, that is to say the disregarded, the ephemeral, the ubiquitous, the fleeting. In short, Jens Liebchen has decided to make use of one of photography's abiding traits, its transfigurative power, whereby the close, forensic scrutiny of an ordinary object can yield a multiplicity of interpretive clues for sifting by the cultural archaeologist, or the open-minded, perceptive viewer."
(Gerry Badger)

Sandra Senn explores her civilised environment with the differentiated intuition of a scientist. She joins her discoveries and observations in seducing compositions which appear as gently constructed stage settings, evolving their iridescent enchantment only by careful observation. This enchantment is enforced by the large-sized pigment prints.

„It is difficult to avoid ideology while presenting flea markets and it seems almost impossible to assume purely esthetic position. Incidentally, the title of the series “Everything belongs to us” can be the best proof. Carnival of objects, captured by the artist, not only attracts attention with esthetics of each composition, but also points to typical characteristics of life, values and outlook.”
(Gulnara Chajdarowa)

Nadja Kuznetsova was born in 1960 in Russia. Her works are characteristic for the photography in St. Petersbourg of the late Ninetees and are influenced by the so-called "artist-photographers" such as Aleksander Kitajev or Borys Smielov as well as the local conceptual art.

After its premiere in the Corkin Gallery in Toronto (CAN), the exhibition presented, for the first time in Germany the series WEGE by the Leipzig artist Frank Maedler (*1963). "One could say that with this work Maedler succeeds in creating a highly interesting paradox - he shows us that the composition of an image can reflect a specific moment in time and simultaneously be a symbolic representation of reality." (Stephan Berg)

10.06.06-29.07.06

Berlin - Leipzig.
11 Positions of Contemporary Photography Concerning Football

Many artists of the 20th und 21st Century have dealed with the subject "football": Willi Baumeister, Max Beckmann, Alfred Hrdlicka, Markus Luepertz and Anton Stankowski are some of them.

18.08.06 - 20.09.06

Marc Volk. raender rauschen remixed.
Photographic Works 2003-2006

The photographic works by the German artist Marc Volk play with the material bases of photography and its industrial ready-mades. Thereby, Volk aggrandizes parts of the negative which, in fact, are not provided for aggrandizement, but for the film transport, the classification or the development process.

23.09. - 31.10.06

Grit Schwerdtfeger | Distanz 2006

With Distanz 2006, Grit Schwerdtfeger "departs from documentary terrain and, along with the viewers, remains a part of the world she photographs. Cheerful, melancholy, and frequently laconic, she balances her art on the threshold between anticipation and memory. The results are completely present. This is the time for seeing."
(Kristina Tieke)

04.11.06 - 09.01.07

Claudio Hils | Industrie_Zeit_Raum

In his photographic series Industrie_Zeit_Raum (2005), Claudio Hils is in search of the historical traces of the German industrial city Friedrichshafen - a town which is characterized by its rise, utopia and fall, and whose industrial relics have lost their value in the present. With analytical distance, Hils traces the remain of a conflicting heir which seems to paralyze the city still today. Hils is a brilliant composer and creates wonderful photographs combining poetic, aesthetic and techniqual elements.

12.01. – 03.03.07

Contemporary Russian Photography and Video Art

The show „Contemporary Russian Photography and Video Art” exposed a selection of works by international, reknown and emerging artists from Russia: Olga Chernysheva, Vladimir Kupriyanov, Nadya Kuznetsova, Marina Gertsovskaya and Anastasia Khoroshilova amongst others. The photographic works, analogue as well as digital, revealed classical photographs, photo collages and assemblages, photo objects and hand worked silver gelatine prints. The images gave, together with the videos, an overview of the Russian daily life and the social concerns of this country. The works have been shown internationally and are represented in many international collections.
Along with these Russian artists, photographs and photo books from Jens Liebchen (Berlin) and Philippe Herbet (Brussels) represented the Western view on Russia.

24.03.07 – 24.04.07

Mauren Brodbeck
CITYSCAPE, URBANSCAPE and CHOCOLATE

Mauren Brodbeck became internationally well known with her series URBANSCAPE in the exhibition "reGeneration 50 photographers of tomorrow".

Heckenhauer is showing this series now, along with two new large format series, CITYSCAPE and CHOCOLATE (2006).

This is her first solo exhibition in a German gallery. Brodbeck works as an artist with photography and video and represents the new young Swiss photography scene.

27.04.07 – 23.06.07

Marc Volk | Raster 384

In his lastest series „Raster 384“, portraits are selected out of a large-size photograph made in a Berlin based stade and enlarged to a irrecognisable composition. Observed closed-by, the faces thus appear as abstract forms, which only from a far away distance become clearly recognisable portraits.

06.07.07 - 14.09.07

Real and Constructed Places

Photographs by
Mauren Brodbeck, Jens Liebchen, Grit Schwerdtfeger, Sandra Senn und Marc Volk

The current exhibition shows the variety in which artists of our gallery approach real and constructed places by simultaneously charging them metaphorically. Along with well-known Berlin localities captured by Swiss photographer Sandra Senn, these places in question range from Liebchen’s ‘Playing Fields’ in the Caspian Basin to Schwerdtfeger’s series ‘Distanz’ taken in Canada and Spain; sometimes they are real, sometimes they are constructed.

21.09.07 - 09.11.07

Sandra Senn | STROMBOLI

In her new series Sandra Senn poses anew the question whether it is possible to experience reality in landscape or if this experience has to be considered as a memory construct emanated from our culturally and emotionally predisposed perception.

Senn's new series show volcano landscapes. Dramatically arranged steaming craters and rapid streams of lava represent Senn's personal examination of the perception of landscape.

For the artist, volcanoes embody the entries and exits of life; their crates provide an insight into the downs of human existence.

Senn's images therefore reflect the diversity of realities in the experience of landscape and simultaneously seduce the viewer to dive into atmospheric, magical worlds.

24.11.07 - 11.02.08

Peter Neusser | STRATA

The show »STRATA« reveals the artist's concern with urban and natural structures in his surroundings. As regards content, Neusser is interested in the alienation and redefinition of a general imagery which can be found in the everyday life.

The series »Multiples« that started with the water images of »Abbadia« in 1999 shows a photographic approach in which important experiences were reinforced, abstracted and alienated through the process of multiple exposure (therefore the name »Multiples«).

It is the element of surprise exposed in the final image that appeals to the artist.

They are removed from the simple perception and form an abstraction of the different sujets via the process of condensation.

»STRATA« is Peter Neusser's first solo show in Berlin.

His work is represented in numerous international collections.