on focus
from 25.02.2022 to 26.02.2023

Claus Feldmann

Ground Control

Locations tell stories – even without protagonists. Television and cinema charge places and rooms with such great expectations that we sense what is about to happen. In his Sets of Unshot Films, Berlin-based artist Claus Feldmann (*1956), who studied at the Nuremburg Academy (1980s) and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles (1991/92), uses this effect to set off a movie in the viewer’s head.

Built by the artist, the sets used for this series of photographs exist only in miniature format, creating a disjointed sense of scale that plays with the appeal of models and lends the pictures an enigmatic quality.

Feldmann’s early photographs from 1990, for which he applied the photosensitive silver bromide emulsion directly to primed sheets of particle board and plywood, have a nostalgic, painterly quality. Two rooms with older and recent photographs present him as one of a number of artists who photograph models, including Thomas Demand, Oliver Boberg, Laurie Simmons and Edwin Zwakman.