Victoria dances. The movements of the slim Ukrainian are still a little reserved, but her swinging skirt gives an idea that she is about to spread her arms and just let go. The triptych with the number 11 from the “Spielräume 2022” by Fotofreunde Glonn could not be more up-to-date. You mean. And yet the source material is almost 30 years old. It’s been so long since the woman from Kiev and her ten-year-old son spent at least six weeks with Sebastian Kugler and his family three summers in a row. The two originally came from Chernobyl to recover and check their thyroid values.
The 67-year-old vividly remembers the night-long conversations they had after a crash course in Russian using a dictionary, hands and feet. And her photo session in the convent school. At that time, the engineer was lucky – when the explosion in the nuclear power plant happened, she was not at her place of work. How are the people with whom you developed a friendship doing today? “We tried to call. It rings, but no one answers,” says the last representative of the original founding team and long-standing chairman of Fotofreunde Glonn.
Not just friends of photography: Gilbert Pinggera (left) and Sebastian Kugler.
(Photo: Christian Endt)
He immediately agreed with his successor Gilbert Pinggera that the club’s current photo exhibition should not only show the beautiful, but also “what moves you”. Pinggera finds the expression “loud pictures” for this. Not a provocation but a reason for conversation. That’s why he created the haunting “Filmpatronen” scenario, which greets visitors on the left as soon as they enter the gallery. In addition to extensively watered film strips with barbed wire and ravens against a background in shades of purple, there are the names of people from Ukraine with “the same hobby or profession”, whose expressive visual language is known from submissions to international competitions.
In the same room, Volker Jäger’s three-minute slide show “Giving New Life” runs on a continuous loop. An old slide box plus passe-partout form the frame, and the recordings of the Wurzer recycling center near Munich Airport are imported from an iPad. After a first unspectacular look at highly objective things such as ambience and processes, a very special dynamic suddenly arises in the sorting systems, the colorful diversity of the bales is reminiscent of a mosaic.
Portrait meets pasta machine – Alexander Gohlke’s series “Mixed Up”.
(Photo: Christian Endt)
Six artists, 24 exhibits with around 150 individual images, embedded in installations and a slide show, mean just as many opportunities to be deeply touched, amused, impressed or simply intrigued. Like the series “Mixed up” by Alexander Gohlke. The end products with a three-dimensional appearance are based on portraits from his collection, which the artist first printed out, then cut into strips with a pasta machine and put back together “upside down” before repeating the process.
Norbert Alexy shows how differently the same motif looks on different supports with “Sylt Beach at wind force 8”. He applied the rainbow behind roaring waves to photographic paper, canvas, acrylic and aluminum dibond.
Bernhard Jungwirth also transformed the still life, which he found as a broken picture on a house wall, several times – with the help of different techniques, so that the rose sometimes appears in black and white, sometimes very colorful or as a puzzle. An entire room is dedicated to these works entitled “As Painted”, which also includes an installation.
Johannes Schmidt captured the power of the dandelion in “Survival Artist”.
(Photo: Christian Endt)
This is also the case with “Survival Artist” by Johannes Schmidt, who impressively demonstrates how the dandelion breaks a path between the grit.
The trees from Gilbert Pinggera’s “Arboretum”, almost all photographed during a dog walk in Amerang, proudly stretch their branches towards the sky. If you turn the twenty boards – touching is expressly permitted – you will find enough information to be able to shine with your specialist knowledge at every quiz show.
Intimate insights, garage doors and reality
Distraction from everyday life, is it allowed in these times? Yes, because there is also a need for a break from the pandemic and war. That’s exactly why one can and should be amused by the bare facts in Sebastian Kugler’s triptych “Geheimer Blick”, for which he himself posed as a model. “Only the legs in the last picture are not mine. That also applies to the bra,” says the Pullenhofener with a smile. If you live in Daxenberg, a district of Zorneding, you could even check whether Volker Jäger immortalized the access to his own car dealership in the 36 colorful views of his “Garage Collages”.
And no, you can’t, shouldn’t and mustn’t forget the people in the Ukraine or the other “uncomfortable” subjects that the six photo artists have placed at the center of their work and about which they are very happy to exchange ideas with the viewers.
Gilbert Pinggera pays tribute to Ukrainian colleagues in “Filmpatronen”.
(Photo: Christian Endt)
It is these encounters on the fringes of the exhibition that make the personal visit so valuable. Feeling the enthusiasm of the creators, their enthusiasm when, like Kugler, they talk about their around 80,000 pictures on the computer, all meticulously tagged with keywords. Or to listen to the stories behind the pictures. You can’t transfer something like this to digital, no matter how artistically perfect the reproductions may be. Because what really counts is above all the conversation, the real experience.
Klosterschule Gallery, Klosterweg 7, Glonn: Saturday, April 23 and 30, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday, April 24 and May 1, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Wearing a (medical) mask is required. The exhibition will open with a vernissage on Friday, April 22 at 7.30 p.m.