Annely Juda Fine Art is delighted to announce the upcoming exhibition: Philipp Goldbach, Verso, the artist’s third solo show at the gallery. The exhibition will be on our third floor and will run from 29th September – 4th November 2023.
Philipp Goldbach is a visual artist whose works explore the relationship between time, written language and technical image - with a focus on photography as both material and metaphor. The exhibition will feature Dance Floor, a walk-on disco-style dance floor that, on closer look, incorporates 7680 art history slides illuminated with an equal number of underlying LEDs that blink in sync with music. A playlist gathers different genres from the 1970s to current titles that refer to visual art in their lyrics - to specific artists, artworks and the ‘art world’. At the opening night of the exhibition, dancers will perform on the dance floor. Drawing on previous works by Goldbach, such as Lossless Compression, 2013-2017, (collection Centre Pompidou, Paris) or Sturm / Iconoclasm, 2013, in which the slide archive of Cologne University's Institute of Art History is strewn about the floor or stacked against the wall, this use of defunct and repurposed technology questions our changing habits and attitude towards record-keeping and the distribution of information, and re-examines the process of acquiring knowledge and re-accessing memory in an ever technologically-advancing world.
Also exhibited will be a new photographic project for which Goldbach has visited major works by the artist Lucio Fontana (1899 – 1968) in museums such as Museum Folkwang, Essen; Pinacothecas der Moderne, Munich; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. In agreement with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan, with the museums’ permission and the help of conservators, Goldbach set up a mobile darkroom in the museum and recorded Fontana’s original works from the 1950s and 1960s through the medium of the photogram; a camera-less image made by placing an object directly on to the surface of a light-sensitive material and then exposing it to light. Light shines through from the front of the Fontana works to the back and the results are black and white renderings that offer a different view of these well-known paintings by one of the most iconic artists of 20th century. “There are a number of things that interest me about Fontana and one of them is his way of dealing with painting, of leaving the illusionary space of the panel painting behind and introducing real space into the picture by opening up the canvas, cutting it up, piercing it. This is something that is also a question for me in photography, that is, to treat and think of the image as a physical object beyond this illusionistic camera image and from its fundamental processes. The painting is also being treated in a certain iconoclastic way.”
Philipp Goldbach
Other works include a colour photogram of a neon work by Ferdinand Kriwet (1942-2018) from the dining hall of the Ruhr University Bochum, and ‘Progression’ light sculptures incorporating used illuminated advertisements from the photo manufacturers AGFA and Kodak installed horizontally in order to correspond with Donald Judd's 'Stacks' and 'Progressions' sculptures. In a continuation of Goldbach’s 'Micrograph' drawings, handwritten versions of texts on photography are transcribed with the letters at a height of only a few millimeters. When looked at from a distance they appear as unevenly structured monochrome abstractions.
