COLOGNE.- Parrotta Contemporary Art Gallery will present works by photographer and media artist Stephan Reusse from February 6 to March 28, 2026, simultaneously at its locations in Cologne and at Burg Lede in Bonn.

The two-part exhibition focuses on two central strands of his extensive body of work: the conceptual portrait series Collaborations in Cologne and the thermographic works in Bonn. Both groups of works are part of a multimedia oeuvre that has, for decades, explored the conditions, possibilities, and limits of photographic image production.

COLLABORATIONS - KÖLN

His interest in photography extends beyond its function as representation to encompass it as a technical process that generates meaning through performative and relational practices, opening up transitions between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence. Stephan Reusse foregrounds the performative dimension not only in front of the camera, but at times also within the photographic development process itself. To this end, in the early 1980s he stepped onto international stages of performance art. There, before a live audience, he made visible once again classics of photographic history or life-size photographs of elephants and giraffes from his Germany Safari series that had previously been made to disappear through a complex chemical process—standing atop a tall ladder and scrubbing the large-format images back into view with a bucket and a broom.

The “magic” of the analog photographic process is staged here—by no means without irony—in a limbo between didactic theater, animal show, and magic performance. One of the early portraits from the Collaborations series was created together with Joseph Beuys. In keeping with Beuys’s own understanding of the ritualistic and transformative dimension of materials, Stephan Reusse developed the portrait of Joseph Beuys using urine. In the Collaborations, the joint work on the portrait unfolds situationally and through exchange with the sitters, who contribute through deliberate self-staging as well as through artistic material interventions—for example, acrylic paint in the case of Leon Golub or blood in the case of Hermann Nitsch. Photography thus becomes a medium of encounter, of tracing, and of reflection on presence, identity, and authorship. John Baldessari, with whom Stephan Reusse studied for a time, places the dot—his signature—on his own face, shifting the viewer’s attention from the depicted subject to the act of seeing itself. While Stephan Reusse may feel a particular affinity with Baldessari’s acuity, irony, and cross-disciplinary approach, he nevertheless approaches each artist with a deep understanding of their individual practice, marked by openness as well as restraint. To allow such distinctive portraits to emerge as precise spaces of meaning, Stephan Reusse enters into a communicative process that manifests itself photographically, with the camera itself serving as the catalyst.

LEAVING SHADOWS - BONN

His images consistently also address questions of memory and temporality. In particular, his thermographic works employ photography as a medium of trace. Using thermal imaging technology, Stephan Reusse captures states that normally remain invisible, shifting the gaze from representation toward energetic phenomena situated between depiction and abstraction.

The series Wolves presents free-ranging wolves not as conventional animal portraits, but as ghostly manifestations of light. The presence of these shy, nocturnal animals is usually inaccessible to our sense of sight and thus also to photography. While the “disembodiment” inherent to photography cannot be undone through the use of thermal imaging, this sensory shift in perspective at least allows it to be rendered in blurred contours. Through the recording of afterimages, thermal imaging makes it possible to look into the past—for example, when Stephan Reusse serially documents the presence and absence of people in a space as it fades in the Chairs series. An explicit engagement with painting is also evident in the Rothko.0 series. When Stephan Reusse photographs museum walls in the absence of the paintings that once hung there, he records the differing temperatures left behind by the removed artworks as traces while they dissipate. That the resulting thermal images take on the appearance of painterly color-field painting à la Rothko is noted as tongue-in-cheek as his recording of flatulence in space. These works open up a perceptual dimension between the material and the immaterial, the object-based and the atmospheric. Yet beneath the seemingly painterly surface of the photograph, even in the case of the thermal images, lies a communicative and performative process grounded in collaboration.