Exhibition
mianki Gallery
Jakob Kupfer - Lichtbildner
October 29, 2021 to January 8, 2022
Jakob Kupfer is a photographer in the best traditional sense. His medium and topic are light and the question of how light can be artistically effective. He is guided by what the medium of light makes available to him and what demands of him. Researching the conditions and modes of action of light results in works that, in their non-representational nature, may represent nothing but themselves, but which reach far deeper in perception.
Objectlessness and permanent change are essential characteristics of light as we perceive it in everyday life. It opens up the world to us, determines our rhythm and influences our well-being. The medium of light, like music, gives art the opportunity to work both on a space and time basis - for example, to develop a painting that also takes place over time.
This duality runs through the work of Jakob Kupfer on many levels and in many manifestations: He avoids the term light painter, but defines his light images as paintings because they are singular. For his time-based works, he uses film techniques, but then frames the images set in motion as singular paintings. The plays of light leave the frame of the picture on the wall as an installation and interact both with the surfaces and with the changing light situations in the room. Partly produced with filmic means, the result is not a film, but light that paints continuously in the room. Kinetic light objects appear as framed images, but, like the light sculptures, relate to
Jakob Kupfer not only dissolves the conventional genre boundaries, but also the demarcation between the work and the viewer and adds another, time-related aspect: the invitation to pause, to take time, to actively perceive and to observe oneself while perceiving. Because what the viewers who get involved in it perceive has less to do with the appearance of the work. It is essentially shaped by the moment and the inner images, memories, fantasies and emotions of the viewer.
Jakob Kupfer’s photographs are snapshots of the light in the space between us and things. One could also say: They make the light visible on the way from the reflecting object to the perceiving subject. The varied color and light trails form resonance spaces in which we can experience what happens to our perception as soon as we get involved in the pure flow of light without explanatory contours. They bypass our filter of rationality without object and thus clear our view of our own emotions, images and truths and of perceiving ourselves.
Jakob Kupfer also composes the multi-layered scores of FADES from photographs and thus adds another dimension to the classic image as a space-related work: that of time. Like natural light, a FADE also changes permanently. The first impression of a framed, stable picture disappears in the next moment. But even the attempt to follow the transformation fails. It is so subtle that only the changed image appears to be perceptible, not the change itself. The abundance of images that arise in the work as well as in the viewer allows transience to be experienced as a gain and rediscovered the value that lies in taking time to enjoy something unique because it is transient. And just like you can't step into the same river twice, we see a FADE, even if it technically repeats itself after a certain time, again and again with different eyes. Our perception renews, changes and develops and the work continues.
In the kinetic light objects, Jakob Kupfer takes up the credo of concrete photography and finds new forms of expression for concrete photography from the perspective of the photographer. The unique pieces, formed from the flow and refraction of light, permeability and change, change not only on the time axis but also from the viewer's point of view - and not in a figurative but in the actual spatial sense.
For the recording of the ECHOS, Jakob Kupfer used one of the oldest methods of photographic design: the cyanotype method developed in 1842. In contrast to classic cyanotypes, the ECHOS are neither prints from negatives nor photograms of applied shapes, but rather unique pieces painted directly onto the paper with sunlight and time. What remains on the paper after development is an echo of the light and the elapsed moment in Berlin blue.
Like diary entries, Jakob Kupfer collected over long periods of time the traces with which the sunlight - provided it was strong enough - "inscribed" itself. The result so far: 389 light drawings, each with an individual signature, as distinctive and unique as the day they were created. But not only the different continuous traces of sunlight of the individual days are inscribed. The rising and falling tracks of the earth's orbit around the sun can also be read - our central light source.
Alternating between spatial objects and floating drawings, the light sculptures appear extremely present and yet fleeting. Protected in an acrylic glass cylinder, the fragile forms of light float without revealing their sources or their static structures, like in a water glass, corresponding to the influences of the surrounding space. In its external appearance a stable sculpture that points to all sides, inside a fluid form that seems to be configured differently from every angle.
mianki. Gallery
Kalckreuthstrasse 15
10777 Berlin
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