Separate Reality | Missing

Erika Anna Schumacher
Photography I Installation
30.04.2021 – 06.06.2021

> Virtual tour

> list of works

opening hours: Mon. - Fri. 2 - 6 p.m. | Sat. 1 - 5 p.m.
Visiting the exhibition is possible in compliance with the COVID-19 protection measures according to the current status by prior appointment.

Observations on the fringes of the art world
The photo series titled MISSING shows photographs that document life at art fairs around the world and represent a certain longing and absence. A series that invites you to go on a search on your own and ask yourself: what is missing when art fairs are cancelled or postponed because of the pandemic?

For many years, as an artist and photographer, I have been collecting observations on the fringes of the art world with my camera. At art fairs in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Basel, Moscow, Miami and the annual art academy exhibitions, I am searching for traces. I am interested in the context in which art is presented as well as the signs of human presence.

In times of lockdown, I am using my archival work to reflect on the current circumstances of the world. This conceptual approach is transformed into specific images. Within the creative process, I am fascinated by how a story emerges from the perceived detail.

In the context of art fairs, bright light and reflective surfaces determine the visual image of the art market. People we see only sporadically from behind and selected details, such as coffee mugs, a fair map or a side table full of laptops and papers give a nuanced idea of these places and at the same time cause a feeling of emptiness and lack of contact.

The thoughtfully composed square photographs in black and white focus on form and content. On closer inspection, the seemingly objective documenting imagery becomes a narrative with a penchant to the fragmentary. Picture elements are cropped and architectural elements block the open view into the room.

The second series titled TRACES presents a counterpoint to that. Photographs of the art academy show window sills and washbasins that serve as shelves for bottles, brushes, cups. The bouquets of flowers, which the graduates received for their successful graduation and which are kept in the sinks on the evening of the ceremony, unfold an intense colorfulness. In the photographs, they look like sculptures and the accumulated objects in the hallway appear like a random installation.

By continuing the digital process, new works emerge from this abundance of colors and elements. Through displacement, transparency and superimposition, they become multi-layered and painterly, a different reality. Separate Reality.
(Text: Erika Anna Schumacher)

Separate Reality
The gallery Coelner Zimmer from Rainer Rehfeld presents three exhibitions with works by the artists Thorben Eggers, Erika Anna Schumacher and Ivana Kleinertz in the context of ‘Separate Reality’.

The term Separate Reality is borrowed from the novel ‘A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan’ by Carlos Castaneda. In it, the author tells of his encounter with an Indian magician who gives him new vision and a different perception of the world. This distorted view of reality creates the experience of the real world in diverse forms. The current pandemic has restricted and changed everyone’s lives. Everyday life and togetherness have increasingly shifted into digital space. By using a computer and a smartphone, we enter into a different kind of dialogue that distorts the view and experience of reality. Artists react to this with their creativity and allow us to perceive their artworks in separate realities.

In his paintings, Thorben Eggers takes up digital images of interiors, which he transfers to another level of perception by means of the special presentation with reflective surfaces. Erika Anna Schumacher shows photographs from an art fair in which she subtly makes hidden details visible. Ivana Kleinertz has developed a hologram sculpture in which it is possible to immerse oneself in a myriad of visual worlds and forms of representation.
(Text: Wilko Austermann)