untitled

gelatin silver print on baryta

Since the 1970s, Gerald Domenig has been working with his preferred media, photography, drawing and text, and has thus created a comprehensive oeuvre characterised by formal rigour and thematic openness. With regard to a construction of reality, the artist uses drawing and photography in quasi diametrically opposed ways. He sees the drawings as sketches or preliminary drawings for his photographs: while the work with the pencil can be understood as an approach to the world, the mostly black-and-white photographs are precisely not a capture of a moment, not merely an image of reality. They are always more than that, namely independent images of a situation, a place. Domenig, who always takes analogue photographs, develops the films himself and makes the enlargements, understands photography as a technique of image construction, the transfer of space into surface, as the dissolution of what is photographed into the image: "When I take photographs, I want to translate an image hidden in three-dimensionality, a latent two-dimensionality, into a concrete image."
In the staged still lifes in small-format photographs of idiosyncratically intertwined objects (such as bowls, broken porcelain, drinking glasses and cutlery), Domenig plays with a perspective that falters, which - as with conundrum images - is difficult to grasp. (Secession, 2016)