Thorben Eggers
Painting
19.2.2021 – 28.3.2021
Szenarien divergierender Realitäten
What is an image in the age of its digital circulation and (re)producibility? Thorben Eggers explores this question in his work, for his images oscillate between practices of the automated-digital and the corporeal-analog.
Infused with a flood of images, we are used to communicating through images in the here-and-now. Whether as smartphone snapshots, gifs, or screenshots, images are edited, shared, commented on, go viral, or simply disappear in the mass of their variations and repetitions. At the same time, processes that fundamentally change our habits of seeing and perceiving are creeping into this image-dominated reality almost unnoticed: photographs are algorithmically optimized, color values and contrasts adjusted, facial wrinkles smoothed.
The works shown as part of the exhibition series "Separate Reality" take up these questions of digitality and, in their play with shifts and reflections, address above all the theme of the spatial and the familiar-everyday. The series of paintings Interior and NYC_APP (whose titles are symptomatically reminiscent of file labels), for example, take up the familiar in their implied depiction of furniture and furnishings, but also produce realities that split up and make digital image interference their playing field. Houseplants, chests of drawers, and sofa fragments, all of which address private everyday scenarios, yet do not merge into them and become detached. Scenarios of diverging realities. What are these realities capable of? And what are these images capable of, as images of a digital everydayness that eludes us, and yet seems to become increasingly familiar?
The works shown as part of the exhibition series "Separate Reality" take up these questions of digitality and, in their play with shifts and reflections, address above all the theme of the spatial and the familiar-everyday. The series of paintings Interior and NYC_APP (whose titles are symptomatically reminiscent of file labels), for example, take up the familiar in their implied depiction of furniture and furnishings, but also produce realities that split up and make digital image interference their playing field. Houseplants, chests of drawers, and sofa fragments, all of which address private everyday scenarios, yet do not merge into them and become detached. Scenarios of diverging realities. What are these realities capable of? And what are these images capable of, as images of a digital everydayness that eludes us, and yet seems to become increasingly familiar?
(Text: Svetlana Chernyshova)
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)
