Joachim Blank »New Works«
September 15 to November 17, 2007

Opening:
Saturday, September 15, 11 am–9 pm // Sunday, September 16, 11 am–6 pm

Filipp Rosbach Galerie is pleased to present a new series of works by Joachim Blank. It is his first solo exhibition in our gallery and in Leipzig.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, as artist, initiator, and author, Joachim Blank was involved in foundation-laying projects that questioned the paradigm shift triggered by digitalization. With Karl Heinz Jeron, his partner of many years, he realized numerous projects, actions, and installations. He took part in documenta X (curator: Catherine David). Since 2000, his works have moved increasingly away from the media of the computer and Internet, whose effects they nonetheless take as their theme. More general aspects, like the deconstruction of the production of images, participation, and mediation in the context of art under the conditions of the information society, ultimately determine the discourse of Blank and Jeron.
Since 2005, Joachim Blank has realized works that aim at physical presence and are based on a precise selection of materials. He builds objects that elude rapid interpretation. In his works, material and pictorial elements meet. He mixes digital production processes like laser cuts and Photoshop filters with industrially manufactured materials like acrylic glass, industrial wood, lacquer, and adhesives. The resulting objects oscillate between picture and sculpture. By using specific construction materials, he consciously cites the context of these materials and endows them with pictorial motifs. The principle of referring to the aesthetic framework conditions of a medium is thereby transposed to the use of a specific material in his objects. His intense grappling with images and their influence on collective perception leads in his works to a subtle transformation of objects with which he seeks a congruence between form and content. The starting point of his working method is often representationality, a photograph, a media image, or a simple drawing that he then converts to abstract-seeming physical objects in space. The result is a game with foreground and background or front and back, picture and frame, or object and pedestal. He transforms images to make them real as objects in physical space.
Blank’s predilection for using glossy materials thematizes the surface in and of itself, in order to penetrate and destroy it with the digital process of a computer-controlled laser. This dissolves surfaces and opens up a view of the underlying surfaces. With Blank, this is a glimpse of the subtle unknown aspect of our world. As clean, cool, and decorative as Blank’s works seem at first glance, on closer inspection they point metaphorically to the instability of knowledge and perception in the globalized world.

The exhibition will be open from Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 6 pm. Visits by appointment at 0172 373 11 10. Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach, and Jörg Rosbach look forward to your coming.