Galerie Poller
547 West 27th Street, 2nd Floor, 212-967-5700
Chelsea
April 12 - June 23, 2007
Reception: Thursday, April 12, 6 - 9 PM
Web Site
Astrid Korntheuer emphasizes in her series Glör how well she can make use of color in a photograph even to the degree we see in William Eggleston’s works: If you took away the color, the composition would not survive. The series itself was taken in the twilight of the so-called `blue hour’ in a valley, which today is flooded again. It was abandoned for some years because a dam had to be restored and nature took the opportunity to grow like in a jungle, left to it’s own resources and creating a fascinating impenetrability.
In her series Loh the distance that speaks from Astrid Korntheuer’s very close up pictures is all the more apparent through the medium of black and white photography. Through the latter’s degree of abstraction, this distance becomes a reference to the metaphors bound up with the forest. However, for the observer this idyll turns into gloom. In many pictures not only can we hardly make out the ground it is safe to stand on, but the twigs and branches become impervious curtains. Where we expect an idyll, there is no getting through.
Indeed, the otherwise really very `nice’ nature, as we repeatedly believe, becomes in Glör and Loh an impassable wall which repels you all the more, the more you engage in Astrid Korntheuer’s game of light and shadow. She uses white, gray and black tones as well as color contrast in her photographs as in an orchestral composition; to form an overall impression which aims for the universal and with which she is all the more accurate in hitting our fine sensitivity for this sphere.