Picture of the Month
Julia Rohn
"Strohhalmstudie (3)"
Petra Noll-Hammerstiel
"Strohhalmstudie (3)" is part of a photographic study of shiny colored drinking straws made of plastic and arranged on a blue background. Although it is planned, the arrangement looks experimental and unpredicted: as in a game of Mikado, the little rods seem to have fallen by chance. The appropriation of an industrial one-way mass product for creating art suggests Julia Rohn’s basic interest in the relationship between everyday or consumer culture and high culture. In this context she mainly examines the visualization of products in advertising, where they are traditionally presented in an all-too-smooth product aesthetic, working suggestively on people’s senses, stimulating wishes and often actually creating needs for the first time.
In Rohn’s case, too, the drinking straws with their shiny surface, their transparent material quality and seductive colors, speak to the senses. And yet in this arrangement, when compared with commercial photography, there is an ironic twist: first, the straws are set in a sensualpoetic “chaos”, a free dynamic play with color and form; second, they are "trivial" objects made of plastic, which in this case completely lose their factual and functional significance and rise to the level of art, in the manner of painted abstract compositions – the abstraction is further enhanced by the transfer into the two-dimensional medium of photography. Julia Rohn’s works, including this series, are always discussing problems of painting. "Strohhalmstudie (3)" reacts to traditional signifiers of painting such as perspective, harmonious color selection and balanced composition with bold forms and colors, which, like her cleaning-sponge and liquid-soap pictures as well, suggest the formal vocabulary of Pop Art.
(published in Eikon, nr. 98, 2017)
Julia Rohn
"Strohhalmstudie (3)", 2016, pigmentbased inkjet print on aluminum Dibond, 70 x 50 cm
© Julia Rohn