Lisa Oppenheim - Everyone’s Camera - Kunstverein Göttingen - Göttingen

through February 24th 2013

Kunstverein Göttingen is pleased to present Lisa Oppenheim’s (*1975) first solo exhibition at a German institution. In the exhibition she continues her exploration of the medium and history of photography. An atmospheric quality runs throughout the works on view, in which pattern, repetition, and the surface of the photograph itself play a central role. Her images of the moon, billowing smoke, flower arrangements, and patterned fabrics are produced through the use of replicated negatives and traditional laboratory techniques, such as the photogram. With motifs that revisit early artistic photography combined with the saturated black or metallic sheen of the paper, Oppenheim’s works constitute a veritable homage to the hand-made print. But despite the lushness of her borrowed imagery, neither romanticism nor nostalgia gains the upper hand. Using appropriation, visual reduction, and serial arrangement the artist engages in a subtle reflection on conflicts that continue to define the photographic medium: between the documentary and the symbolic, between representative and the abstract.

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