Win Zimmermann
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Win Zimmerman’s photographs appear as drawn pictures. The artist utilizes the medium of photography, but estranges its pretension. While photography has to do with documentation and reality, Zimmermann’s works intentionally reject these expectations by incorporating flaws. What photography is capable of doing is lead ad absurdum and used as a powerful instrument.
The imagery works with the optics and aesthetics of painting. Thus, the compositions appear pictorial and composed even though the motifs do not arise from reality and are not arranged. The focus is not on chance snapshots. Theme and moment are chosen carefully. The content is present without the artist´s action. The critical intervention is the decision and the selection of a specific motif and detail isolating it from its environment. This approach illustrates the differing developmental processes of painting and photography: painting draws from nothingness, it creates something, while photography isolates and denies its environment.
The photographs are subordinated to painting, they imitate it, blurring the medial boundaries. This blurring also occurs on the level of motifs. Fuzziness disguises and conceals the motifs and poses questions to the spectator, not only concerning the identity of the depicted persons and objects but also one’s own. This creates a unique and mysterious aesthetic, which complicates the orientation for the spectator within as well as outside the picture.
Mysteriousness is achieved by cinematic instruments that resemble the spontaneous aesthetic of film stills, which are stripped out of context and function like a glance through the keyhole: they concentrate on an extract, while denying the contextual.
It is a second glance that unfolds the images and lets them be realized. What is depicted? How does the medium change the view of the picture? The works do not deal with a specific picture theme in the sequential sense,rather, they share a recurring existential subject. Each picture stands for itself, but examines ontological situations such as momentariness, life and death. This might be depicted quite explicitly in Ludna Niechorze, but can be found in all of the imagery due to the isolation and indeterminate nature of places and persons. This suggested impression leads the spectator back to basic topics of human existence.
words by Jana May
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