"The Language(s) of the Photographic" is a curated dialogue and a cross-generational selection from the gallery program – featuring works by Erica Baum, Viktoria Binschtok, Juan Pablo Echeverri and Jan Groover.

On view are key pieces with institutional pedigree and work freshly out of the studio, which will be premiered at Paris Photo. In conceptual and painterly progressions that oscillate between abstraction and figuration, our presentation unfolds a variety of ways of engaging with the medium, tracing different approaches to manifold languages of the photographic – (analogue) text and (digital) texture; still-life vs. performative practice; the 'studio' vs. the layered depths of the 'www' and the various ways of 'smart communication' of our times...

In Erica Baum‘s (*1961, New York) works from her Dog Ear-cycle, photography and printed matter together become visual poetry between reduced abstraction and concrete immediacy. At Paris Photo we will present a larger grid of this pivotal series – bringing together works from 2009-2022.

digital semiotics is the telling title of a visual endeavour by Viktoria Binschtok (*1972, Moscow). In these completely 'made-up'-images she brings together a kind of photographic alphabet of digital communication in our networked world via her iconographic pictorial language. A juxtaposition of precise image-making strategies and performative aspects layered around coded communication, signs and signals, text and poetry; sub-culture and mainstream imagery; with analytical acuity, formal rigidity and free play between the digital and the analogue.

The nine-part performative block MUTILady by the Colombian artist Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022) from 2003 shows how the perception of personality can be influenced by external changes and manifested through photography. It is a major early work in Echeverri‘s ouevre, which is currently enjoying a revived re-contextualization. Shifting Identities, the perfomance of the self, vulnerability and the irrefutable dignity of being 'human'.

Another highlight is a rare set of vintage photographs by Jan Groover (1943-2012) from the late 1980s and early 1990s. These fascinating chromogenic color prints show still lifes that take the historically contested rivalries between the pictorial processes of photography and painting ad absurdum and formulate their own position within art history. Being Jan Groover's largest prints, they are often referred to as arguably the most visionary works in her ouevre per se – as such aesthetic and conceptual blueprints of the booth.