Philipp Goldbach

Philipp Goldbach uses a wide range of media to explore the relationship between time and written language.

He became known for his series Blackboards and Micrographs (2010) for which he photographed chalkboards in rooms at various German universities where great thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno once taught. Often concerned with philosophical ideas, Goldbach transcribes seminal philosophical texts in impossibly small pencil handwriting or into the circuit of a Read Only Memory board, yielding large yet arduously intricate drawings and minimalist sculptures that hark back to outmoded forms of technology and highlight the “materiality of information”. More recent photographs experiment with the development process in analogue photography, using torches and light filters to ‘draw’ onto photographic paper and investigate the role of photography as a “Universal Language”, itself a philosophical and sociological concept.

In his most ambitious, large-scale installation to date, Via Lucis, 2015 is made from the entire slide collection of the archives of Cologne University’s Institute of Art History. 150,000 picture slides - photographic reproductions of art works representing over 2000 years of cultural history – are stacked against the wall covering an area of 2.5 x 8 meters to form a three-dimensional mural with a flickering, random pattern.