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Götz Diergarten & Robert Klümpen – Schöne Grüße!
Location: EMDE GALLERY - Mainz
The Emde Gallery is pleased to present the dual exhibition "Schöne Grüße!" featuring photographic works by Götz Diergarten and paintings by Robert Klümpen. The exhibition combines selected works from past creative years with insights into the artists’ most recent work – a dialogue in which, as the invitation card already suggests, flowers appear as a central motif.
The two artists have known each other since their student days at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Art Academy) in the 1990s and have worked together several times since then. Regardless of the differences in their media and approaches, points of contact and similarities can always be discovered in their choice of subject matter. Both place the everyday at the centre of their work by transforming simple, unspectacular motifs in such a way that they open up new aesthetic dimensions and levels of meaning.
The OPENING of the exhibition with artist talk will take place on Friday, 25th of April from 6-8:30 pm.
MAINZER MUSEUMSNACHT: Saturday, 14th of April from 6 pm to midnight
All the works of Götz Diergarten, who – fully in the tradition of his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher – works serially, in broad-based groups of works and likes to compile his photographs as typologies, are based on an interest in making the "special in the banal" visible and sensitising people to a new perception. His motifs are taken from everyday architecture: houses, beach huts or underground stations. Diergarten rarely shows the buildings in their entirety. Instead, he concentrates on individual details such as façades, windows or other building elements that appear detached from their context. Another central aspect is that he photographs in colour throughout. The colourfulness is of decisive importance and lends the photographs a painterly quality with their affinity to disregarded places and unspectacular motifs, without slipping into the picturesque.
In his work, Robert Klümpen deals intensively with the relationship between figuration and abstraction. Earlier works show everyday night scenes illuminated by artificial light – pubs, kiosks, fairgrounds, construction trailers or bus stops – often indicated with just a few dark brushstrokes. At the centre of the subsequent series of works are abstract paintings: eccentric variations of colour field painting, framed with painted frames or borders that not only define the picture as such, but also emphasize its two-dimensionality. He involves all his paintings in an eloquent exploration of painterly techniques and modes of expression. The history of art, with which Klümpen is extremely well versed, also permeates his work, which is characterized overall by a reflective play with quotations and references that oscillates between homage and reinvention. The artist's picture titles frequently form an additional layer, often with a humorous undertone.
A good example of this are the brightly coloured bouquets of flowers he has been creating since 2022. Klümpen takes up a classic subject that has been important in art for centuries – from baroque vanitas paintings to modernism – and develops his very own contemporary interpretation from it.
Several of these works are on display in the front room of the gallery, hung close together as if in a small picture salon: tulips, sunflowers and other flowers, delicately arranged in sweeping movements in vases, jugs or glass vessels. These floral compositions are created by painting over older abstract works, thus creating an exciting contrast between figuration and abstraction. Instead of a naturalistic reproduction, Klümpen reduces the forms and works with bright areas of colour, mainly applied with acrylic, oil and oil pastel.
The works, some of which are created directly on the object in front of a bouquet of flowers, are rich in art-historical references. However, these blossoms bursting with colour have nothing to do with the old idea of "transience". Instead, Klümpen draws on the tradition of the modern flower still life. His paintings evoke memories of flower images that have collectively inscribed themselves in our memory or that seem familiar to us from art history. One sunflower is enough to evoke associations with van Gogh's iconic sunflowers painted in flaming yellow. In other paintings, Klümpen makes reference to Odilon Redon's ornamentally dense blossoms or David Hockney's colourful compositions, to name but a few.
Klümpen's flower paintings are decorative without exhausting themselves in the decorative. Rather, a dense network of quotations and references and subtle humour unfolds beneath their colourful surface, which only becomes apparent at second glance.
The cut flower motif that adorns the invitation card also follows this strategy: the colour photograph – a private photo by the artist – is reminiscent of postcards from the 1960s. The flowers look artificial, almost sterile, but at the same time they are also beautiful in their nuanced colours. The classic subject of the flower still life is transformed into a kitschy postcard aesthetic with the inscription "Schöne Grüße!" (Best Wishes).
Floral motifs can also be found in Götz Diergarten's new photographic works, the "inside-out" and "outside-in" series created since 2020. Here, Diergarten photographs his motifs through various types of semi-transparent glass, either with the camera inside looking out or vice versa. He experiments with different glass structures, such as ribbed, fluted, corrugated or ornamented glass. The layer of glass between the camera and the subject acts like a filter that transforms the world behind it into abstract compositions of amorphous, softly flowing colour fields.
One of the works on display in the exhibition is a large-format light box that only hints at a yellow flower bathed in soft light behind corrugated glass. The figurative dissolves and is painterly transformed. In addition, several smaller formats on aluminium supports can be seen, such as a bouquet of paper flowers photographed through corrugated glass. The incident light is scattered in such a way that the flowers dissolve into a relief-like, orange-red-pink structure reminiscent of painterly gestures. Diergarten's window pictures open up new perspectives on the familiar. He succeeds in seeing the everyday in a new light – in the truest sense of the word.
The paintings by the two artists are deliberately hung close together in different heights and formats, creating an almost collage-like overall picture. The associatively hung flower pictures in the front room, in which the works seem to find their place next to each other at random but with a clear view, are complemented in the rear section by deliberately placed pairs of pictures, each consisting of a photograph and a painting.
For example, a photograph of a simple street sign meets a painted street lamp – the latter an allusion to Martin Kippenberger's ‘drunk’ lanterns. In another pairing, the round silhouette of an advertising pillar in Klümpen's painting is formally mirrored in a round high silo in Diergarten's photograph - which in turn represents a deliberate reference to the silotypologies of his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher.
The works shown in this part of the exhibition are from earlier phases of the artists' work. Klümpen's paintings show nocturnal scenes of everyday life, observations of urban peripheral zones. On display are places that appear deserted and yet carry a certain narrative tension. The motifs usually remain vague, only vaguely hinted at, dissolved to the threshold of abstraction. They are characterized by a peculiarly ambivalent mood between familiarity and eeriness, between banality and existential gravity. They thus stand in marked contrast to the cheerful colourfulness and luminosity of the flower paintings in the front room.
Diergarten's photographs in these pairings also come from earlier series. As always, his aim is to visualize the extraordinary in the banal, thereby enabling a different perception of familiar things. Although his photographs are kept in a factual, documentary style and thus refer to the objective character of the medium, on closer inspection they reveal themselves to be thoroughly composed images that point beyond what is depicted. His photographs are depictions of reality found and deemed worthy of depiction, but at the same time they are also autonomous pictorial constructions; they appear factually neutral and yet testify to a very personal view. Diergarten himself describes his works as photo-images and thus perfectly summarizes the dialectical tension inherent in his work.
The works of both artists interact in a subtle way. They appear related because the artists use similar motifs and arrive at comparable compositional solutions. The interplay between the earlier works and the current flower paintings is particularly appealing. This reveals a deeper, shared interest that goes beyond motivic and formal correspondences: the reflective, ongoing examination of one's own medium and the artistic process of image creation. What is a picture anyway? And what possibilities remain for painting or photography today, when it seems that everything has already been seen or depicted before? How is it possible to rethink a subject such as the flower in painting or photography, a subject that has been so thoroughly explored in art history? And where is the boundary to abstraction?Götz
Diergarten (*1972 in Mannheim) studied fine art and photography under Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1993 to 1998, followed by further studies in photography at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Zurich. He is regarded as one of the most important German photo artists of his generation. His works have been shown in numerous national and international exhibitions, are represented in important collections worldwide and have been published in numerous exhibition catalogues. He lives and works in Frankfurt am Main and Volxheim.
Robert Klümpen (*1973 in Issum on the Lower Rhine) studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1994 to 2002, initially with A.R. Penck and later with Dieter Krieg. He occupies an important position in contemporary German painting. His works have been presented in numerous national and international exhibitions and are represented in important public and private collections. After professorships at the HfBK Dresden (from 2014) and the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle (from 2018), he has been Professor of Painting at the HBK Braunschweig since 2022. Robert Klümpen lives and works in Cologne and Braunschweig.
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