LICHTTROPFEN | DROP OF LIGHT (PART I)

Kicken Berlin begins a new exhibition series in 2023 entitled Lichttropfen | Drop of Light. Alluding to the gallery’s first name when it was established in 1974, the drops of light suggest the numerous forms of expression possible in historical and contemporary photography. In the gallery’s fiftieth year, the exhibition series Lichttropfen highlights all of photographic history as well as current discourses. Each exhibit will put a central artistic position, question, or topic in the context of other conceptually or methodologically related works. The gallery’s first name originated from Rudolf Kicken’s formative time as an intern in the early 1970s at the legendary LIGHT Gallery in New York. In 1971 Tennyson Schad (1930-2001) had founded the first contemporary, commercial gallery dedicated solely to artistic photography. Not long after, Kicken and his partner Wilhelm Schürmann took the reins of LIGHT Gallery’s European branch.
On the occasion of EMOP Berlin - European Month of Photography and to kick off the Lichttropfen | Drop of Light series, Kicken Berlin will show new color photographs by Götz Diergarten. The new series inside-out and outside-in will be shown in conversation with related works from the twentieth century including photos by Werner Mantz, Peter Keetman, Jaroslav Rössler, and others.
Diergarten works in the tradition of his mentor Bernd Becher’s serial typographies and in the mode of America’s new color photography. He focuses on otherwise unseen images, the extraordinary of the everyday. Over the last twenty-five years, he has captured functional architecture in urban and rural areas of Europe, with particular interest in series, structures, and color fields (Gouville, Ravenoville, METROpolis, Nowa Huta). His first ventures into using different kinds of glass as semitransparent image transformers were made in the 2010s in Frankfurt’s mid-century churches and in a Duisburg mining village. He found similarly textured glass panels — blown by mouth and installed in the entryways and vestibules — in the housing blocks built by Ernst May in Frankfurt in the 1920s. Depending on the structure of the glass — rippled, ornamental, reinforced, or glass block — and on the point of view, lighting situation and refraction, and background, they grant either soft or vivid images with gentle, amorphous color fields. What they depict can only be guessed rather than known, the glass serving as a second layer that abstracts the reality of the streets, trees, and objects behind. Minimal adjustments to the camera’s angle generate surprisingly different images. The various surfaces of the glass lend each image a different haptic texture that further defamiliarizes the work. Diergarten redefines the classic window image from art history: his windows neither trick the eye with authentic reproduction or offer a window to the world but instead offer a new view on the seemingly familiar. This new perspective is closely related to photography, but the opaque or almost transparent piece of glass inserts itself as an additional medium between the camera and the subject and lends the new perspectives new depths with its glowing structures and surfaces. With some types of glass, like the reinforced glass and glass blocks, optical effects shift the appearance of the image. They recall grids, pixels, and distortions. Only rarely do details like a window cross or board suggest the window’s explicit characteristics. Diergarten often crops his images so that the window frame is not visible; the glass stands in pars pro toto for the whole. The works in the series inside-out, which assumes the view from the inside looking out, are displayed in flat, wall-mounted light boxes. This presentation formulates yet another characteristic of a “light image.” The works from the opposite view, in the series outside-in, are classic prints.
Kicken Berlin has positioned Diergarten’s subtle vistas in a wider photo-historical context as well. New approaches to (re)creating images and to perspectives were pivotal to both New Objectivity photographers and later, at mid-century, to the subjective photography movement. The images from inside-out and outside-in stand alongside counterparts from these various movements of the twentieth century: architectural photography by Werner Mantz and Karl Hugo Schmölz, structural abstractions by Peter Keetman, and op-art montages by Jaroslav Rössler.

The exhibition is part of EMOP Berlin - European Month of Photography in cooperation with Kulturprojekte Berlin.