Forms of Reality

What's it about?

Forms of Reality: From Becher to Kandl The photobook is far more than a printed archive; it is an independent artistic medium. No other movement has probably shaped contemporary visual culture as sustainably as the legendary "Becher School". Founded by Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, a radically new view of the world was established here: cool, objective, precise, strictly conceptual. Under the title Forms of Reality: From Becher to Kandl, this exhibition is dedicated to important publications of this era and explores a fundamental question: How much reality is contained in the photographic document? The monographs shown by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Ruff form the core. Their books document urban spaces, faces, and globalized landscapes in precise series. They capture the traces of reality but develop them further into visual monuments of our time in the printed book. The exhibition deliberately expands this view to include four groundbreaking boundary-crossers who reflect and challenge the discourse of the Düsseldorf School: Joachim Brohm, a pioneer of German color photography from the Essen Folkwang tradition, responds to the strict industrial architecture of the Bechers with a color-intensive, atmospheric everyday reality. Thomas Demand, who studied sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy, finally pushes the principle of the document to its conceptual limit. His books show no traces of the real world, but rather perfect fiction: photographs of life-sized, reconstructed paper models. Michael Schmidt. As a solitary figure in Berlin photography, he rejected the dense perfection of the Düsseldorf school. His photobooks are raw, political, and deeply emotional explorations of ruptures and historical traumas. Leo Kandl extends this discourse from a specifically Austrian tradition. In his groundbreaking photobooks "Wiener Runden" and "Weinhaus", he dedicates himself with a deeply humanistic, calm gaze to people and everyday life on the outskirts of the city. With Kandl, the camera becomes a tool of quiet approach, exploring the boundary between documentation and intimate proximity. Forms of Reality: From Becher to Kandl shows that the photographic document is never objective. By browsing and comparing these works of book art, it becomes visible how reality has been dissected, felt, questioned, and finally completely re-constructed over the last fifty years. A total of 18 publications are shown.