Brancolini Grimaldi announces the first ever UK solo exhibition by
leading German photographer Joachim Brohm. The exhibition will feature
work from throughout Brohm's 30 year career, from early series including
Ruhr (1980 - 1983) and Ohio (1983-84) through to more recent projects
such as Culatra (2008 - 2010). The exhibition will also include
Paradis, an early series, which has never been exhibited in a gallery
show before.
Joachim Brohm rose to prominence in the early 1980s and was among the
first Europeans of his generation to recognise the artistic power of
American photographers including William Eggleston, Robert Adams and
Stephen Shore. He was also one of the first photographers in Europe to
shoot exclusively in colour starting in the late 1970s, connecting the
visual possibilities of colour photography with a newly defined
"everyday cultural landscape." At the same time, Brohm's sequences of
photographs show how important the medium and the artist's archive have
become as reflectors of our day-to-day existence, challenging him to
keep developing and reviewing them in the light of changes to the
reality of our lives.
Culatra (2008 - 2010), forms the main focus of the exhibition.
Culatra is a small, scarcely populated Portugese island on the edge of
Europe, unspectacular but exotic in many ways, where solid houses sit
next to shoddily built shacks. Brohm has created an archive of the
island focusing on its inventory - boats, tractors, shacks, backyards,
facades and more, many of which are removed from their original
function and context. And despite the beautiful white sand and blue
skies, the island looks almost deserted, adding to its sense of
abandonment and desolation. Brohm's pictures confront all this with a
vantage point that shifts between overview and detail, distance and
closeness. They reveal the hidden inner riches of the imagery of the
banal.
In his early series Ruhr (1980 - 1983), we see different types of
landscapes in the Ruhr region of Germany, an area undergoing huge change
during a process of de-industrialization. Brohm turns his gaze on the
edges of urban life, where existence tends to have a rural feel, where
shopping-centres and small business zones have established themselves.
The erratic settlement of the landscape where the cities burst out of
their central structure is one of the interests with which Brohm
anticipates the discussion of the 'urbanization of the landscape', which
only developed around 1990. An elevated camera position is a constant
feature in the composition of these pictures, so that we mostly see a
larger segment of the landscape stretching out below us. People seem
safely at home in it. This familiar, everyday ambience assumes a form of
quiet monumentality.
In Ohio (1983-84), made by Brohm during a year long stay as a
Fulbright-Scholar in the American city of Columbus, he captures aspects
of an urban America not specific to any locale. Both familiarly American
(the gas stations, the types of cars, the shops), and unfamiliar (from
a car on fire to a deserted drive) Brohm is never trying to show us a
documentary representation of reality. Rather these images give us a
concept of America at the beginning of Ronald Reagan's presidency
depicting the transience of the American dream and the alienation and
isolation related to it.
Throughout his career, Brohm's work has explored the edges of places
as he has sought to capture the on-going and perpetual changes
happening in society and how they affect both the landscape and the
people in it. It is in the hinterlands, the in-between places, where
Brohm finds unexpected moments of hidden poetry, where neglect and decay
become an expression of society and emphasise the temporary beauty of
much that surrounds us.
BIOGRAPHY
Joachim Brohm was born born 1955 in Dülken, Germany. He lives and
works in Leipzig and since 1993 he has been Professor of Photography at
Leipzig Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst/Academy of Visual Arts.
His
work has been included in many important international exhibitions
including: Concrete - Photography and Architecture, at the Fotomuseum
Winterthur/CH (2013); Aspects of Color: A History of Color in
Photography from Pictorial to Contemporary, Kicken Berlin (2011);
Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven, Canzani Center Gallery, Columbus
College of Art & Design, Columbus/Oh, USA (2011) and Visions of our
Time. 10 Years of Photography at Deutsche Börse, C/O Berlin (2009).
Solo
exhibitions include: Color, Landesgalerie Linz im Oberösterreichischen
Landesmuseum, Linz/A (2011); Culatra, Kicken Berlin, (2011) Ohio,
Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica/Ca, USA (2011): Color, Fotografische
Sammlung/SK-Stiftung Kultur, Cologne (2010). Culatra, Allgarve 2010,
Quinta de Marim, Olhao/Portugal; Joachim Brohm, Kunsthalle Mainz
(2009); Culatra/Areal (with Heribert C. Ottersbach), Galerie Michael
Wiesehöfer, Cologne (2009); Culatra/Areal (with Heribert C. Ottersbach),
Beck & Eggeling, New Quarters, Düsseldorf (2009).
Selected
publications include: Ruhr. (Ed./Text: Heinz Liesbrock), Steidl
Publishers (2007); Ohio. (Ed. Thomas Weski, Text by Thomas Weski and
Vince Leo), Steidl Publishers, Göttingen (2009); Joachim Brohm, Heribert
C. Ottersbach: Culatra/Areal. (Ed. Kirsten Nordahl, Text by Thomas
Wagner), Steidl Publishers, Göttingen (2009); Joachim Brohm: Color. (Ed.
Die Fotografische Sammlung/SK-Stiftung Kultur, Köln and Landesgalerie
Linz im Oberösterreichischen Landesmuseum, Linz/A, Text by Gabriele
Conrath-Scholl), Schirmer-Mosel Publishers, Munich (2010)
