Exhibition Detail - Samuelis Baumgarte Galery

Germán Gómez

About the exhibition

The Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie presents the internationally renowned photography and collage artist Germán Gómez in a solo exhibition. The Spanish artist, who we exhibited in our gallery in 2013 with a large retrospective with very positive reviews, will finally return to Bielefeld in autumn 2019 after a serious accident and the rediscovery of his artistic creativity.

Germán Gómez was born in Gijón, Spain, in 1972 and perfected his distinctive style of photo collage after studying at the Complutense University in Madrid. Gómez, who has received numerous international art prizes, developed a virtuoso processing of his photographs that makes each of his collages unique.

The opening of the exhibition “Travel Notices” will take place on Saturday, September 21, 2019 at 5 pm. The artist will arrive from Madrid. In addition, a color catalog will be published for the exhibition.

Germán Gómez ‘artistic technique is linked to the tradition of" Sewn Photographs "founded by the German artist Annegret Soltau, which has been making these in various versions since 1975 and whose intensity and characteristics even impressed Andy Warhol. Warhol finally presented his own variant of such processed photographs in the 1980s. Gómez transfers this traditional compositional technique of cutting as well as sewing together and riveting into an aesthetic that is unique to him, with a direct proximity to people and urban sceneries.

Art history knows a multitude of pictorial approaches to the city, as place and non-place, as living space or as architecture without any human life. With his project Deconstruyendo Ciudades, which started in 2015, Germán Gómez creates his very own vision of an architectural journal. Each of these often large-format works, such as Madrid 4, 2018, C-Print on paper, polyethylene, Japanese paper and lacquer, 193 x 100 cm, becomes a mirror of our multifaceted perception of the big city through Gómez ‘Intervention. The artist shows us that it is not possible for us to grasp an extensive image, but that we have to put it together ourselves from small, ambivalent parts, like a puzzle.

Photography, as the keeper of moments, is used in the presented works by Gómez for a striking visualization of the facets of cultural memory. The individual and the common memory consist of a multitude of incidents and impressions. In analogy, the collaging and “being sewn” of these impressions creates a coherent overall picture in our lives, as in Singapore 1, 2015, C-Print on paper, polyethylene, Japanese paper, varnish and pens, 60 x 150 cm, which the memory symbolized by millions of people in the island state. Gómez ‘works are therefore always multi-layered mirrors of urban spaces and architectures, but also of their residents.

Gómez also processes this view of people in his much-discussed Retrato series. It impressively brings us closer to the fact that people, through their willingly and unwillingly put on masks, are just as multi-layered as our perceived image of them. This is particularly evident in JH29, 2017, C-Print on paper, polyethylene, Japanese paper, polyvinyl acetate, graphite, yarn and lacquer, 100 x 193 cm by breaking up the smooth facade of the photograph. The view into the artist's bedroom and thus into the private sphere becomes a deconstruction of the voyeuristic gaze of the camera itself and ultimately a metaphor for Gómez's photo collages: Through the staging of the fragmented and assembled photographs, Germán Gómez understands the technique of deconstructive photography and to bring together the perception of our living environment in an aesthetically highly complex form.

From 21 September to 2 November 2019 the exhibition “Travel Notices” is presented at the Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie.

Die Ausstellung ist geöffnet

Montag – Freitag von 10:00 – 18:00 Uhr und Samstag von 10:00 – 14:00 Uhr