Häuser
 

Artist in Residence Project

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Archival Pigment Prints, PhotoRag (40cmx50cm/16"x20"), 2003

„Bergbauer positions his chosen half-timbered buildings digitally against smooth black backgrounds. Strictly separated from their village and their social surroundings, these ”witch houses” seem now to float in a nameless space, like apparitions from a long disappeared world. They attract us magically but at the same time evoke a slight feeling of creepiness by awakening memories of our childhood fairy tales. In the series, these portrait-like sculpturally staged architectural forms seem like prototypes of a crumbling and forgotten ”mythic” order that seen by day proves imaginary. And in fact, Bergbauer is not trying to create architectural historic documentation. Rather, his alternately found and constructed ”ideal images” try to illuminate the bizarre dialectic of demonism and ”Gemuetlichkeit”, which describes and reveals what may be an essential aspect of ”the German” - pitch black irony close to falling into kitsch, but in the knowledge of the possibilities of the medium that it uses.“

From ”After Nature - Photographic Images between Illusion and Reality” by Ulrike Lorenz, Exhibition catalog Gerhard-von-Reutern-Haus, Willingshausen, 2003