Thomas Steinert »How One Becomes What One Is – 30 Self-Portraits, 1969—1999«
January 19—March 1, 2008
Opening: Saturday, January 19, 2008, 11am—9pm

Disaster Protection. Thomas Steinert captured in pictures the feeling for life in the last two decades of communist East Germany. His documentary photographs remain to be discovered. For example, the pseudo–decadence in the nude–dancing bar »Haus Connewitz«, which Western trade fair visitors were so keen on. And he has an eye for icons of utility that mirror society. In the steel pipe constructions on children’s playgrounds, he found the ugliness of everyday life in »actually existing socialism«; in the streetlamps that turn up in Neo Rauch’s paintings, he found failed hope. »Their futuristic design was once the epitome of a communist future that would be as streamlined and gleaming as these lamps,« says Steinert.

But Steinert’s pictures are much more than documentary photos. Nor is he a milieu photographer who spreads a vision of worlds of life only to sink knee–deep in them. He shows the men and women waiting in ballet-like grace for the streetcar in front of a computer center as an urban tableau of an existential waiting à la Samuel Beckett. The girl in a short skirt lying on a motorcycle and playing a Hohner clarinet in front of a boy is an eternal Lolita shedding all circumstances. Subtly, almost incidentally, Steinert captures how claims, convictions, and explanations shift, become brittle, and lose contact with reality. In 1985, he photographed Arnold Breker statues standing beside a Soviet barracks in Eberswalde. The Red Army soldiers had painted the statues golden-bronze, placed them in front of a banner bearing Olympic rings, and surrounded them with pictograms by Otl Aicher. The Nazi sculptor, the brother–in–law of Sophie Scholl [the dissenter whom the Nazis murdered], and the communist war enemies are brought together for a provincial sport event on a soccer field in a collage emblematic of German’s painful 20th–century history.

When everyone could feel that the society was dissolving, but no one found terms for it, Steinert saw in small gestures the beginning of vast changes. Anyone who wants to experience something of the atmosphere of the last two decades of East Germany, anyone who wants to get to know the amalgamation of images and feelings, yearnings and frustrations that people were exposed to, ought to take a look at these pictures. Here someone marginalized himself to the degree that he could get a view of situations, signs, and moods that others did not want to see.
—Gerhard Mack [excerpt from a portrait of the artist in art–Kunstmagazin 2/2008]

Steinert’s 30 self–portraits from 30 years show the metamorphosis of a 20–year–old citizen of East Germany into a 50–year–old citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany who abandons himself to sarcasm on a high level, but thereby reveals with a clear eye the paradoxes of the societies on either side of the rustic fence dividing Germany. Life is beautiful and unbearable and sometimes it is fun.

Publication: Thomas Steinert »Connewitzer Welttheater – Fotografien von 1964–1994« Lehmstedt Verlag, Leipzig 2006; 128 pages, 117 entire-page plates; ISBN 3-937146-34-2

Thomas Steinert [*1949] born in Burgstädt, Saxony, former GDR, lives and works in Leipzig,
1972–1977 Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, Diploma Photography.

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 6pm.
Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach, and Jörg Rosbach look forward to your visit.
For additional information and privat viewing by appointments, call +49 [0]172. 373 11 10
—Translated by Mitch Cohen, Berlin