Ending: July 17, 2 pm – 9 pm
Studiovisit
Showroom
Interview with Thomas Nitz (in German)
Exhibition video
Opening: May 22, 7 pm on zoom
Duration: May 22 – June 12 2020
In the exhibition crossover+, the Berlin-based photo artist Thomas Nitz explores the feasibility and border crossing in imaging photography and deals with it experimentally. It is no longer the photographic image that dominates, but rather the search for the means to create pictorial reality. Where the photographic is otherwise graded for the purpose of preserving the image, the actual content is the graphic in conjunction with the photographic image. With his work, Nitz poses the fundamental question of the value of the final product, the image.
Thomas Nitz moves between painting and photography. In his shootings the drawing is always the first step. He paints the models with rough means such as barbecue coal on a 1.6 m x 1.6 m canvas. Only then is the model placed in front of the drawing in a long exposure and exposed. The “Darkbox Camera” constructed by the photographer himself is used. The 100-year-old wooden camera with a darkroom attached as a back exposes paper negatives in the format 13 x 18 cm, which can then be developed immediately. The result is visible minutes after the shot. The negatives are printed by Thomas Nitz in contact process with liquid photo emulsion on self-coated cardboard. The special thing: The drawings made in advance are not kept and catalogued for a while, they are destroyed after each session – they are simply painted over. What remains is only a negative, which reappears photographically as “lost”.
The resulting unique pieces refuse to be classified into categories, they act as objects. The depicted persons connect with the drawing and show their presence as blurred shadows.
In the series LOST and BRUT Thomas Nitz goes one step further into the experimental.
In LOST the artist focuses entirely on the reversal of values. He dissolves the boundaries between painting and photography. In times of infinite reproduction, he creates unique pieces and destroys preliminary drawings, only to leave them alive in the resulting photography. For the photographs he makes rough sketches, which almost seem to have been created in a kind of manic drawing frenzy. They seem to have been taken from an overflowing drawing pad, which was filled with roughly painted sketches in a furious fit. Intoxication, eroticism, rage – the artist ultimately transports all of this into the photographs. After the sketches have been destroyed, the fullness of the feelings remains in memory only as a copy.
In BRUT Nitz goes to the limits of aesthetics – and beyond. In a deliberate demarcation from conventional food photography, the photographer focuses on the pure, raw and coarse. He crosses the border from the appetizing to the unappetizing and consciously stages this. In this series, Thomas Nitz relies exclusively on large image technology in black and white and always photographs frontally from above without targeted lighting. With this new form of expression, the artist brings food photography into an area beyond the pleasing, where not least the imagination wants to cross the border to disgust.
