Jochen Lempert photographs the animal world in the most diverse contexts: from the natural habitat to the museum, from the zoo to the urban environment, in remote places or banal settings and situations. Lempert compiles his findings in a vast archive of images covering an ample spectrum, from common everyday views, to compositions that tend towards abstraction. This interest in the natural world as a subject has been further complemented by his exploration of the properties and materiality of the photographic image. Analogue, black and white, hand-printed, his photographs resist categorization and confront the canons of today’s aesthetics. Two recent photographic series by Lempert are presented in the exhibition: Untitled (Atlantic Ocean) and Untitled (Courbet).
They are separate works that the artist presents one next to the other with the intention to find links among them. A four part photographic series of a beach seen from high angle is connected with a detail of a female foot in The Young Bather painting by Gustave Courbet. Observed from a distance, the pictures of the ocean, quite abstract, seem to delineate a figure, a part of a body, undefined but as sensual the bather’s naked foot entering the water.
Jochen Lempert . Untitled (Courbet) . 2020
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