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| Town, Country, River by Jenny Gaschke |
Art and documentation are a mismatched pair, but occasionally art becomes the seismograph of its time. In the best cases, it even captures the movements of a generation. The artist Stefanie Bürkle has aligned herself with her times. For those of us who grew up in the 1970s—as Bürkle, who was in born in Heilbronn in 1966, did—her art gives visual form to the tremors of an experience long ignored because it seemed so normal.
Her “Eiscafé Venezia” photo series takes as its subject the ice cream parlors common in small towns across West Germany in the 1970s and 80s. Bürkle photographs the facades of these “Eiscafé Venezias” in their everydayness, even their banality—the way they would look if one were just walking by. In this way, her photos invite sentimental associations of an innocent youth of which the Eiscafé was a much-loved part. Yet Bürkle does not let herself get lost in the past. Nor does she succumb to the kind of brand-name infatuation one finds in Florian Illies’s “Generation Golf,” where childhood experiences are meticulously assembled around products and consumerism.
Like the title of an exhibition at the Stuttgart gallery Vero Wollmann—Stadt, Land, Fluss, or “Town, country, river”—Bürkle’s works can be compared to a “Reisebild,” a 200-year-old art genre whose function was to open the eyes of contemporaries for sight-worthy things in the broadest sense. Bürkle is able to uncover—or better, to create—things that are worthy of sight. With her camera or brush, she finds image-worthy perspectives in the world, and into the world, that surrounds us. The association triggered by the image or photograph is an elemental factor in this mutual seeing—a mutual seeing that her images allow us to share.
The basis of Bürkle’s art of deliberate looking is her sense for internal construction, a sense she shows us in her “mock ups.” On the hard, die-pressed fundament of the new exhibition grounds in Stuttgart, the beholder glimpses four glass facades of different size slightly from below. For their presentation as future building elements, they have been placed on standardized cement foundations and stabilized with frames. They stand at right angles to each other before a hilly background and rise into the cloudy, light-gray background. By directing the viewer’s eyes to these objects, Bürkle makes them into axes and lines independently structuring an abstract composition. Her thoroughly monumental orchestration in the churned-up wasteland lends the windowed facades a poeticizing character.
No doubt, Bürkle’s ability to use the camera to make constructive and constructing views comes from her training in stage design and theater architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, which she undertook before studying painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Bürkle’s work with the grand projects of Paris in the late 1980s was directly fueled by her architectural interests in comparing urban situations with excerpts from stage settings.
It is on these foundations that Bürkle embarks on an expedition into the terra incognita of visual knowledge. Her search for unexplored images takes her to Berlin, a place that embodies her concept of city as stage, a place where architecture and scenography come together in form and content.
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