“I am the bread”. A quote from Jesus, Chapter 6 Gospel of John? “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never go hungry again …” Bread is the key food in the cultures and religions of the Orient. If you were to search through the Old and New Testament alone with the key combination Ctrl + F, you would constantly come across it: bread rains down as manna from heaven, is distributed to 5000, implored in the Lord’s Prayer, broken at the Last Supper. The title of the current exhibition in the Pasinger factory opens up a huge space of reference, also to art history. On the still lifes of Flemish masters, on Man Ray’s famous blue baguette or Käthe Kollwitz ‘dragging, oppressive hunger lithograph “Bread!”
Joerg Lehmann works in Berlin as a food photographer and stylist. He came up with the idea for Internet platform “I am the bread “. With this project he found an ally in the Munich curator Stefan-Maria Mittendorf, who shares Lehmann’s enthusiasm for bread and has now brought his photo art to the factory. Completely coherently supplemented with works by Sonja Alhäuser and Janine Mackenroth. They are practically the driving force of this exhibition, so Lehmann’s photo worlds, which sometimes tend to have a slippery advertising aesthetic, are less easily digestible due to the interplay with subversive painting, video art and installations.
Lehmann copies the pictorial strategies of baroque still lifes almost perfectly, they are delicately illuminated, every fold of the tablecloth sits there, pomegranate seeds sparkle fleshy, crispy bread crusts activate the viewer’s olfactory nerve. But the artist, who was allowed to live over a bakery in Paris for eight years, is strongest when he lives out his love of bread with a personal touch. With tender devotion as in the picture “Lisa” or with a wink in the series “La Corrida del Panadero”, in which a baker performs a paso doble with sticky bread dough, elegant as an overweight bullfighter. Lehmann also supplied a selection of so-called found footage material with the exhibition, i.e. historical black-and-white photographs of anonymous origin, probably taken in France at the beginning of the last century. People pose for the family album, or for someone who wanted to imitate the great photo documentarists August Sander or Henri Cartier-Bresson. Baguettes, a lot of baguettes, are involved.
Elementary handicraft: Sonja Alhäuser’s art of recipes “Favorite Bread”, 2021.
(Photo: Bernhard Friese, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021)
Sonja Alhäuser served up a baguette, deceptively real, as an ingredient for the Pasinger show. She, too, is an artist who includes food in her work, which can go as far as the performative organization of entire banquets with references to the orgies of the surrealists around André Breton. Or one size smaller; The show shows rings made of bread dough coated with gold leaf, which Alhäuser created and incorporated for her own wedding to represent the transience and fragility of marriage.
“You are what you eat” is the most disturbing work of this show, the video of a eating performance by the Munich artist Janine Mackenroth, which was created in 2018 during her stay as artist in residence in Brooklyn. Mackenroth can be seen for 17 minutes and 46 seconds as she puts chips made from organic blue corn into her mouth. A whole bag disappears with a cracking and snarling sound. Stoically conditioned, without any outburst of emotion, in its formal simplicity this is a provocative representation of human consumer culture. And a bad trip for everyone who suffers from misophonia. With this radical video we come full circle in a show that is well worth seeing. We are what we (fr) eat. With all the consequences.
“I am the bread”, Joerg Lehmann, Sonja Alhäuser and Janine Mackenroth, P.ART Gallery of the Pasinger Factory, August-Exter-Straße 1, until November 28th, www.pasinger-fabrik.de