Bungalow Park | Main Hall 2
About the exhibition
The Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie is presenting the Hamburg photography and collage artist Christine Schindler (* 1968) in Main Hall 2 for the second time since 2013 with a solo exhibition of the series Bungalow Park. The artist's photography discusses and tries out the basic options of the medium: documentary photography meets subjectified perspectives that combine to form resonance bodies of historical and still lively places and call for reflection and reflection.
The opening of the exhibition "Bungalow Park" will take place on Saturday, September 21, 2019 at 5 pm. The artist will be present.
The series of works “Bungalow Park”, which was also presented with a very positive response at Art Cologne 2017, was created through Christine Schindler's travels to the Pityusen island of Ibiza, among other places. She has been exploring the island with her camera since 2001, completely off the beaten track. The artist shows us depictions of the “Bungalow Park” in Es Figueral, a settlement built by the Nazis and their sympathizers after 1945, which does not seem to fit into the island idyll that we imagine. She deals with the gloomy shadows of the island, on the east coast of which there are a number of villas and buildings built by a Bavarian property developer, which today have almost been forgotten, but are not all uninhabited. In these apparently deserted places there is a subtle tension, "an aesthetic of decay", according to the art historian and former head of the world art market, Dr. Charles Rump. Christine Schindler, however, captures another facet of the buildings in her photographs: After the Second World War, Ibiza became an important destination of the "Rattenlinie" (“rat line”), the escape places of former high-ranking Nazis who stayed incognito, under the protection of Franco and the Spanish legislature could evade criminal prosecution in Germany. Some of them spend their old age there to this day.
Christine Schindler describes the experience of these opposing places between the past and the present, which often work with bizarre collaged scenes as follows: “The intense sunlight increases the remaining color, for me synonymous with life and death, recognition and forgetting, and creates a tension of morbid Aesthetics. ”This gives rise to the interpretation radius of her works, often created as montages, which, through their specific compositions, capture the historically oppressive atmosphere in today's scenes. Because the “decay on Ibiza also has a fine aesthetic”, which the artist captures with “a fresh, precise look”. The author, journalist and former editor-in-chief, Beate Wedekind, concludes her photographs "show how everyday life goes on after the murder".
The deciphering of these often oppressive compositions from idyllic landscapes of the present and the historical trace of national socialism, loads the photographs with an inevitable individual examination of the "perpetrators, victims, victims and survivors", as the renowned art historian and director of the Kunstmuseum Bonn Dieter Ronte wrote. The works experience a particularly shaking relevance in our current times. The artist's photography series, the first edition of which was bought by Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt am Main shortly after it was created, is therefore a constant appeal to remembering and against forgetting - it is an existential discourse about life.
From 11 September to 02 November 2019 the exhibition „Bungalow Park“ will be presented at the Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie.
Opening Hours
Monday - Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Information
Opening: Saturday, 21 September 2019, 5 p. m.
Press
Die Foto-Wirklichkeit als Welt-Collage, NW 21./22.09.2019
Zwei Sichtweisen architektonischer Landschaften, WB 21./22.09.2019
