Tilmann Krieg
"SKY.PLANE.GIRL."

Exhibition: 18 April – 8 May, 2016
Vernissage: Friday, 15 April, 7pm

Tilmann Krieg is one of the great street photographers, who vanquishes documentary photography, nor simply relies on the classic esthetic character of a well composed and even mayby black and white photography, but follows a completely different path of artistic expression in his own and unique style: painted photography, situated exactly at the cross-roads between photography and painting, narrative fabulation and abstraction. His technique, too, is self-reliant and original. He accepts and delves into the motion traces of his photography, reinforcing them even, by the use of diverse unusual support materials, such as steel, copper or aluminum.

The documentary character of a photograph thus recedes into the background or disappears completely, making room for playful properties of light, which becomes not merely a medium of photographic painting, but additionally unfolds a multitude of effects on the reflecting surfaces of the support material. The result generates an original and unique work, a discourse on time for which the artist uses photographic means. Tilmann Krieg’s works relate to photography as a whole, in all its essential components – just as cinematographers often reach back to their own early works for inspiration.

Galerie Mansart features the artist in an exposition consisting of three chapters, inspired by the film “Sky, Plane, Girl” of the Russian film director Vera Storozheva. Each positioning of a picture signifies a new point of view, questioned and challenged with the tools of photography. The first chapter “Sky” consists of a sort of spatial installation created by multiple repetition of a single piece of work. The photograph becomes both medium and method.

The second chapter "Plane" has the effect of a visual narrative, based on the geometry of shapes and the aesthetics of their displacement and doubling. “Girl”, finally, reveals one of the mainstays of Tilmann Krieg’s oeuvre in a classical way: the female form.

This exposition of Tilmann Krieg, who has exhibited before in Korea, China, Switzerland, Germany, Brasil and the US among many others, is exceptional to me. Tilmann Krieg’s work no doubt transports a narrative aspect but immediately transcends it, lifting the viewers glance beyond the immediate story. His oeuvre appears in dialogue both with nature itself and with the phenomenon of photography. (Azad Asifovich, Curator)