Moving Monuments — Thomas Kellner — Black & White

Opening: Saturday, September 28, 2024, from 7 pm
Duration: September 29 to October 19, 2024
Opening hours: Wednesday to Friday 3pm to 6pm, Saturday 1pm to 6pm

Who would have thought that such a miracle is still possible in an age of digital manipulation with analog photography? Alan G. Artner

On September 28, the VisuleX Gallery for Photography in Hamburg opens the exhibition “Moving Monuments. Thomas Kellner - Black & White”. Black and white tableaux of well-known monuments from 1997 to 2005 will be presented, framing a selection of his striking color photographs. With “Black & White”, Thomas Kellner returns to his artistic roots and the tradition of black and white photography.

At a time when many artists are turning back to black and white photography, Thomas Kellner is also looking back to his roots ten years later. The little published works in black and white reflect the beginnings of Kellner's career, when he experimented in cycles with different visual languages in the black and white laboratory until he finally found his unique, multi-perspectival and deconstructivist visual language in 1997: the composite image either as multiple exposures on a negative (1993-1998) or as a sequential montage on a contact sheet of roll and 35mm film.

From an initial sketch of the Eiffel Tower as a homage to Robert Delaunay and Orphism in Paris, Kellner began to turn to architecture and increasingly complex compositions. He created timeless images of iconic buildings in a newly formulated language based on Cubism. In his early black and white photographs, Kellner concentrated on the structure itself. The relationship between object and pictorial form is at the center of his observation.

In the exhibition “Moving Monuments”, world-famous monuments from San Francisco, New York City, London, Paris and other major cities radiate a new fascination in black and white. The artist is also showing selected large-format works in color, such as an impressive photograph of the Empire State Building.

Parallel to the sales exhibition in Hamburg, the Landesmuseum Oldenburg is showing the exhibition Thomas Kellner Sights from 28.9. 2024 to 12.1. 2025.

Vivian Laux-Eggert