Tobias Hantmann

Dreck / Dirt / Vuil
Galerie Bernd Kugler

When The Focus Gets Out of Focus – Tobias Hantmann’s Revision of Bernd and Hilla Becher

Tobias Hantmann’s (b. Kempten, 1976; lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf) creative practice performs methodical shifts, continually destabilizing what a picture can be. He undertakes explorations of visual conception and imagination propelled by dislocations of context, the unsettling use of materials, and variations of motif.

Bernd and Hilla Becher’s industrial photography is the point of departure for Hantmann’s most recent project, Dreck—Dirt—Vuil. He trains his eyes on the details that have nothing to do with the architectures under consideration, that just happened to be on the scene and ended up inside the frames due to their proximity to the objects. Focusing on the industrial debris immortalized by the Bechers’ pictures, Hantmann then translates his creative meditations into a series of watercolors. His pictures examine the “difference between object and non-object, between object and dirt, as well as the question of how and whereby one may be transformed into the other,” as Stephan Gregory writes.

With an essay by Stephan Gregory and a text by René Luckhardt and the artist.