LONDON.- Atlas Gallery presents the first UK solo exhibition of work by Andreas Gefeller (b.1970, Düsseldorf), “a rising star among Germany’s fine art photographers” (Ben Burdett, Director, Atlas Gallery). Gefeller belongs to the generation which followed the great Duesseldorf school of artist photographers, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Axel Hütte, who took the art world and the art market by storm in the 1990s.
Gefeller’s artistic vision is driven by scientific zeal and a desire to see beyond superficial appearances. Throughout his photographic practice, Gefeller attempts to reveal the fragmented nature of human perception and how the camera can serve as a true documentary lens of reality.
Atlas’ exhibition will display works from series spanning Gefeller’s career, including Soma (2000), Supervisions (2002-15), The Japan Series (2010) and Blank (2010-15), and will show the evolution of his ideas up to the present day, culminating in his latest series, The Other Side of Light (ongoing series since 2017).
Gefeller is perhaps best known for his Supervisions, the large-scale, cartographic composite photographs of urban landscapes, seemingly from a bird’s eye perspective but, in fact, only from head height. Pointing the camera straight to the ground, Gefeller walks a large area – a swimming pool, a parking lot, a beach – taking a shot at each step. Helater puts these many hundreds of frames together digitally, recreating virtually a map of the area he explored, creating mesmerising mosaic-like images of incredible detail. This labour-intensive technique of artificially pixelating images, particularly landscapes and city views, and then digitally rebuilding them has become Gefeller’s signature style.
In Soma (2002), Gefeller transformed enormous, standardised and aseptic places like hotels, beaches and parking-lots in Gran Canaria, into bleak utopian sets, voided of the human presence. The resulting images feel like an out-of-time, metaphysical stage that gives the viewer space for narrative interpretations about a virtual reality.
In The Japan Series (2010), Gefeller questioned the fluidity of perception and the hybrid nature of things by juxtaposing man-made artificial structures (of poles and cables), which are transfigured into proliferous, lively structures reminiscent of plants, with cultivated plants that have become artificial looking, almost engineered, to the point of losing their essence.
In Gefeller’s world, any existential state is precarious and can shift into another – "like a wave slowed down x1000 times turns it into a galaxy, with each drop looking like a star.” Perception is deceiving and existence is in flux, as if any minute the same atoms could move from one structure and reconfigure into another. In Blank (2010-16), he sought the "molecular structure of urbanity” through a journey from large scale urban areas, to buildings, ending with tiny scrap-metal elements. Gefeller excessively overexposed the images, manipulating the light to eliminate gradually all things, reaching a total white, a visual zero, which became a metaphor for the flood of information that surrounds us.
In his newest series, The Other Side of Light, Gefeller has focused again on artificial-looking structures and patterns in nature and decontextualised them, creating images that could be illustrations for modern phenomena.
“My works could be visualisations for processes for which we don’t have pictures – because they are invisible, just digital processes, they somehow just happen theoretically but not in our daily visible life: who knows how the ‘cloud’ looks like? The internet? Digital communication? Artificial intelligence?” – AG
Light becomes a tool to show the limitations of vision, by blurring the content of his images with brightness – some through overexposure and some through image manipulation. Unlike his previous urban series, Gefeller uses natural forms such as water reflections, clouds, the leaves of a tree. The artist considers how light can eliminate extraneous detail in an image to allow the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps.
“The branches of a Chilean Araucaria appear as delicate and translucent as single cell organisms in a light microscope, while simultaneously they bear a threatening effect due to their resemblance to the sand worms from Frank Herbert’s novel Dune.” – AG
Gefeller places strong emphasis on surveillance and the colonisation of space. Many of the images show the topography of the landscape as extended and decentralised to emphasise structural patterns, as though from a satellite. More recently in Blank, the artist has been interested in light as a destructive force, paring back architectural structures to their most basic shapes to show the digitalisation of civilisation. In The Other Side of Light, Gefeller takes these ideas a step further by interrogating natural forms to capture their smallest details. These details and patterns become visual suggestions that make present what we do not see.
“What is vision for, when the real forces that affect our lives have become invisible?” – David Campany in his essay in Andreas Gefeller’s book Blank, 2016
Gefeller has won numerous prizes and his works have been in solo and group museum shows such as at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Marta Museum in Herford, NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Kunstverein Hannover, Museum der Moderne in Salzburg and Kunstmuseum in Bonn to name a few, and has his first solo show in the UK at Atlas Gallery.
His works were shown and acquired by British collector Charles Saatchi in his Out of Focus exhibition (2012), by the Art Fund International funding scheme in 2013 on behalf of The New Art Gallery Walsall and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery for their collection exploring the metropolis and urban environment.
