Götz Diergarten: typisch typologisch

Götz Diergarten's photographs are devoted to everyday architecture: ordinary houses and their façades are just as much of interest as plain, wooden beach huts or subway stations. The buildings in the photographs are rarely captured in their structural entirety. The artist mainly shows smaller or larger details, isolates façades, windows or other building elements from a larger context. In doing so, he depicts reality as he finds it: Nothing is staged or changed, no subsequent digital manipulations take place. He is an 'image finder' and not an 'image inventor', as he himself repeatedly emphasises.

The heterogeneity of the photographs, which come from his immediate surroundings or are taken on journeys and usually follow his own search, is initially held together by a conceptual rigour reminiscent of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and an ostensibly objective gaze. Götz Diergarten also works serially, in broadly conceived groups of works, and likes to arrange his photographs - as the title already indicates - as typologies in order, according to the artist, 'to emphasise the individual in the uniform or to make it comparable'. This is illustrated, for example, by the photographs of beach huts from Belgium, Normandy and England from the years 2001 to 2005, a selection of which can be seen in the exhibition, or the Duisburg windows from 2018, which have been put together to form a typology of nine. The same applies to the picture 'Nowa Huta', from the series of the same name from 2010/11. Here, the viewer looks head-on at the multi-storey façade of a uniform high-rise. The loggia-like niches painted red, green, yellow and orange - as well as the three trees in the foreground - form a strong contrast to the grey, cold façade and testify to the desire for individualisation and differentiation.

Here, another central aspect of his artistic work comes to light: Götz Diergarten photographs exclusively in colour. The colourfulness is of decisive importance for the constitution of the image and, with its strong affinity to unnoticed places and unspectacular motifs, lends the works a painterly quality. The photographs of the series 'Pirmasens' from 2013, which show precisely centred sections of façades that one often carelessly passes by in everyday life, exemplify this. The photographs are flat, enlivened only by the structure of the wall. They do not merely depict narrow sections of house walls, but at the same time appear as abstract constellations of four differently coloured surfaces that relate to each other horizontally and vertically, so that they can almost be read as abstract colour field paintings.