Drawings from the Mental Archives
Steffen Kern
Exhibition duration
27. November 2021 – 31. January 2022
Spaces in the light of night and twilight, deserted, enigmatic, mysterious. You think you know them, these places, and yet they are not part of the usual and everyday. - They are perfect. Without traces of use and without the imprint of time, they become models, prototypes of our imaginary cosmos. The collective memory of the Western world, its dream of efficiency and flawlessness constitute the pictorial treasure that Steffen Kern's art reflects. "The image and film production of the 1950s and 1960s played a key role in the post-war TV media revolution. The equipping of most Western households with television sets meant that many people were confronted with very similar or the same images, ushering in a globalization of images," he says, which also explains why his paintings do not take photographs as their point of departure - or at least not directly. The flood of ever-similar images that we encounter every day in films and photographs are only the last reflection of basic models that are sanded down and aligned with each other through this constant repetition.
Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy
The exhibition and publication is sponsored by the Neustart Kultur Initiative of the Federal Government from the Stiftung Kunstfonds.