COLOGNE.- Thomas Rehbein Galerie presents Andreas Gefeller Supervisions - New works, on view 25 January - 1 March 2008. Ever since the digital technology noisily and overwhelmingly stormed onto the field of photography, the medium has had to wince repeatedly at the question about the degree to which its traditionally distinctive characteristic, namely an indissoluble connection to the factual, still remains capable of providing a meaningful basis for photographic discourse. In his astounding and precisely balanced pictural projects, Andreas Gefeller offers evidence of the type of foundations which may be laid down here without subsiding into anachronistic documentary fetishism. After the early work complexes Halbwertszeiten (1996) and Soma (2000), he has achieved with the large-scale series Supervisions (2002) a discovery of reality by means of a construction which is both document and invention. With the help of a tripod attached to his body, the artist proceeds across a previously laid-out motific field and records it, step by step, in up to 2,500 individual shots. The composite picture which is subsequently generated digitally shows bird's eye views of sections of parking lots, precast-concrete buildings or a lawn strewn with golf balls - in other words, banal structural details, but such as we have never seen them before. The works are thereby transformed into reflections upon the dialectical structure of vision and visibilty in general: that which we see actually does not exist. And, for a long time now, we have no longer been able to see that which does in fact exist.
Stephan Berg, Kunstverein Hannover.