ECLIPSE | ANDRÉAS LANG

Eclipse | Andréas Lang
Guardini Gallery | January 23rd – April 18th 2019
Opening: Tuesday | January 22nd 2019 | 7 p.m.

Berlin, 2019, January 14th
Guardini Galerie presents from 2019, January 22nd on, Eclipse, an exhibition of photographs by artist and photographer Andréas Lang, who illuminates with his contemporary dispute of history a chapter in the past between Occident and Orient, that has been effecting us until today. The Middle East is not coming to peace and the actuality of this conflict is even more evident after 9/11 and when looking at the complicated political situation in the region and the revival of religious fanaticism – in the West as in the East.

With his pictures, Andréas Lang seeks for the hidden stories in different kind of places, may they be of historical, mythological or personal nature. He searches for traces and reveals manifold layers with his photographs. The pictures are in a state of suspense between past and present, reality and imagination. He calls his approach ‘visual archaeology’.

While in astronomy an ‘eclipse’ describes the phenomenon of one celestial body covered by another, Eclipse has here a more multilayered meaning. Though, it was a solar eclipse in 2006 that inspired Andréas Lang to start his cycle of landscape photographs relating to early Christianity and the Crusades in the Middle East, Turkey, Syria, Israel and Palestine.

He seismographically skims for memories turned into stone and lets the light draw traces inside the camera through the widely open lens. The visible and the invisible, the present and the absent are captured in that way. Works of art are coming into being, nearly metaphysical ones in black-and-white, but also colour photographs, creating glimpses of the connection to our times. The pictures track the fateful, sometimes tragic sites of European history, where the spirit of the past blends atmospherically with the present. Influenced by Romanticism, especially the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, Lang’s photographs also want to address humanity’s great questions.

Hans-Michael Koetzle concludes his catalogue text with the question: The centuries of religious and cultural conflict – where will it all lead? There is one absurd picture of a signpost punctuated with a question mark. Do we know? We do not.
Lang suggests to us his ‘meditation in pictures’.

Andréas Lang received several awards and stipends – latest 2018 the stipend and residency of the academy of culture Tarabya in Istanbul and 2017 the working stipend of fine arts by the Kultursenat Berlin. His works have been exhibited internationally, e.g. at the n.b.k. Berlin (2018); Mercosul Biennale, Port Alegre-Brazil (2017); Rathausgalerie / Kunsthalle, Munich (2017); Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin (solo 2016/17); Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung, Berlin (solo, 2016); Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich (solo, 2013); Deichtorhallen – Haus der Fotografie, Hamburg (2011); Centro de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2007).

The Guardini foundation Berlin shows the series Eclipse, exhibited in 2008/09 in the Gallery of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für christliche Kunst e.V. Munich, the Stadtgalerie Altötting and at the Paris Photo, with a revised concept.

The exhibition will be accompagnied by a catalogue book with texts by Hans-Michael Koetzle, Frizzi Krella and Stefan Weidner, it will be published by Hatje Cantz in March 2019. The catalogue book is supported by the Verein Ausstellungshaus für christliche Kunst e. V., Munich.