CHRISTOPH NIEMANN | Photodrawings

Kicken Berlin opens the fall season with Photodrawings, new and partially unpublished works by Christoph Niemann. The international, prize-winning artist and author is one of the world’s most well known contemporary illustrators. He regularly creates work for renowned publications such as the New Yorker, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine. Niemann’s work depicts and describes the affairs of the day with a light hand and thoughtful commentary. One of the primary topics of his work is how visual culture today is being renegotiated. Niemann has curated the selection of works on display at the Kaiserdamm gallery himself. Niemann’s work conceptually draws on various movements of the twentieth-century avant-garde. These include interest in everyday culture and photographic work, in which he bridges media by adding illustration to photographs and thus carries the torch of dada’s and surrealism’s collages, montages, and readymades. With an eye to these aspects, Kicken Berlin has often already contextualised Niemann’s photo-based works alongside twentieth-century works by artists such as Pablo Picasso and André Villers, El Lissitzky, or Saul Steinberg, among others. In his photodrawings, the artist reshapes and extends photographs he has taken around the world with illustrated figures and objects, just as in his cult Sunday Sketches. Niemann follows a tradition of artists such as Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) and Tomi Ungerer (1931-2019) who also transcended media to combine illustration and photography. Steinberg designed new visual works by enlivening photographs, and other images, of ordinary places and things with drawn lines, imbuing them with new meaning. Niemann advanced the tradition further, transforming everyday scenes with illustration in his sensational campaigns for the Deutsche Oper, Berlin. By showing the concert house — highlighting everything except the stage and actors — he helped uncover is genius loci in both unconventional and unexpected ways. He transforms the street corner into a strictly geometric optical illusion, a hardwood floor into a futuristic constructivist tableau. Organically curved and robotically angular creatures are granted a stage for a dynamic narrative moment. The effect is in fact abstract, where the visual play takes the foreground before the storyline. The exhibition includes both original photodrawings as well as c-print editions. The works of Niemann open up a truly contemporary artistic dimension: he draws life and lives his drawings within the photographic moment. In doing so, he affords the viewer enlightening insights into the phenomena of the everyday and current affairs.
(Carolin Förster)