W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #andreasgefeller, #thefuture

We all look at hundreds of thousands of photographic images. Curators, dealer and editors working in the photography world undoubtedly look at even more. The hope is always that there will be something fresh, the thing we have never seen. As Diane Arbus said, “My favorite thing is to go where I have never been.” It is rare to encounter a new talent with a compelling vision. It is like venturing into the future and returning with this report: Andreas Gefeller.

Gefeller takes us to an unfamiliar place, a destination not seen before. We may recognize it but not like this.

The works are collectively titled “Supervisions”. These are “groundscapes”—mostly—aggregates of thousands of individual digital photographs. Each image is shot from a height of approximately two meters, made as the artist paces off the area to be photographed. He literally maps it. These individual shots are then stitched together in the computer.

Gefeller offers an intensely detailed view of the world, and it is unique. The viewer knows what he is seeing but senses that it is not actually possible. This is a low flying “a bird’s eye” view. The joke would be that the bird would have to be a very fussy stork with total recall. The work is representational, a sort of topographic reportage, and yet, it seems disconcertingly unreal. Shooting over and over so close to the ground yields a panorama of details with no perspective.

The technique is assured and exact, even virtuosic. The talent and artistry are in Gefeller’s “eye”—his uncanny ability to locate spaces that will unfold so stunningly, to imagine that the final “Supervisions” will have such presence and resonance. 

Start with Gefeller’s “Driving Range”, 2004 which seems to be a constellation of white stars lost in an infinite green universe, tiny dots on an endless fairway. It is like a giant void that on close examination is exactly what its title indicates.  

“Lottery Tickets”, 2004, behaves like a J.M.W. Turner abstract painting of a sunset, which you discover is a sweep of little pieces of paper scattered on a cobblestone street. There is a sense of this as a giant vortex or wave crashing over the grid of bricks. 

The “Racetrack”, 2004, holds the wall like a giant Renaissance trompe l’oeill mural. Closer up it suddenly presents—without perspective—a galaxy of details from Hong Kong newspaper ads for Chinese masseuses to torn up betting slips to a discarded Evian bottle.  

His “Holocaust Memorial", Berlin, 2008 is a giant matrix or diode with small footprints suggesting the slightest presence of people, an unexpected meeting of strict Modernism and humanistic forensic evidence.     

The work started as analogue and was liberated by digital technology. What Gefeller does could not have happened 10 years ago. He was recognized for earlier bodies of work made with film, Soma (Utopian landscapes) and Halbwertszeiten (Radioactive Half-Lives), but Supervisions signal a quantum leap ahead.

The very large size of these photographs adds to their presence and power while making them even more ambiguous and puzzling.   

“It was a combination of scientific interest and boredom. But seriously: As a child I was very interested in astronomy, and I was fascinated by images of the surfaces of other planets, especially by those images, which showed a lot of details and which had been assembled by piecing together dozens of individual exposures, made by a satellite in orbit, to create a large, mosaic-style tableau. *1

Indeed there is a direct connection between the NASA moon and Mars “mappings” in Gefeller’s work.

“25 years later (around 1998) I am on a picnic at the river Rhine with a friend, who is taking a nap, while I am bored. So I'm starting to survey the ground, taking photos with my Minox camera—I as a satellite and the ground beneath me as the alien surface of the planet Mars, except that instead of being hundreds of kilometers above ground, it's only two meters. Later, when I cut the contact sheets and assemble them I note that I can really move away from the ground like something flying—not in reality, of course, but in a photographic way.” 

Further the work relates to David Hockney’s pieced together Polaroid landscapes and portraits, but Gefeller recognized that late in the process of developing the “Supervisions”. It is worth noting these artists deal with perspective differently; Gefeller has none, and Hockney plays around with it. 

The works also have a kinship with tapestries, not only in the scale, but also in the way they are incrementally built up or assembled. The surfaces appear to have a texture too. The systematic back and forth of the artist as he shoots the piece is like the warp and woof of weaving.

It is worth noting that as contemporary and innovative as Andreas Gefeller appears, Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar J. Reijlander made composited photographs by combining separate negatives almost 150 years ago.

"Any dodge, trick and conjuration of any kind are open to the photographer's use.... It is his imperative duty to avoid the mean, the base and the ugly, and to aim to elevate his subject.... and to correct the unpicturesque ... . A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial in a picture.”*3  

In other words, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The “Supervisions” reflect the artist’s heightened sensitivity to time, evidence and order. 

Each element of the finished image represents less than a fraction of a second exposure time as he steps off and, from shoulder height, photographs every square meter below. But this takes a considerable amount of time (even before allowing for the studio time at the computer combining all of these elements).

In other works, this is noticeable, in particular, in the lengthening shadows of “Parking Site", Düsseldorf, 2007. It has Eadweard Muybridge’s breakthrough perception of time and the running horse. The record of time is history, and it can be found in the celebratory detritus left on the ground after a World Cup soccer match in “Berlin, 07/09/2006” or in the paint on paint on paint of the Pollock or Basquiat-like “Graffiti", New York, 2007. The more we look the more we see. In “Sand Tracks", Miami, 2007 the details of the easily identifiable logos on shoes serve as a sort of a “Google Earth” time capsule, a Miami Moonwalk. There are layers and layers of time. Gefeller likes these signs of life.  

The artist finds the tension between whirling craziness and calm, the chaos of water as it ripples and shimmers playing over the orderly bold black graphic at the bottom of the “Swimming Pool", Düsseldorf, 2008. Understanding the artist’s shooting technique in limited form, I am absolutely baffled as to how he was able to make the various parts of this and then to piece them together. It must have been a Herculean effort. 

Similarly the breaking foaming waves oppose the still, transparent patches of sea in “Beach", Domburg, 2006. The checkerboard pattern subtly but definitively reveals time.

Consistently Gefeller moves the viewer to a new dimension, a previously unseen, even unknown world, itself gridded and squared off on the wall. It is not the intention, but the works reference Modern painting. The above mentioned “Swimming Pool” has the graphic simplicity and grace of a hallucinatory and electric Agnes Martin; “Sand Tracks” acts like an off-white Robert Ryman; and “Entrance", Paris, 2006, a tiled floor area at a set of air-locking doors at Charles de Gaulle Airport, behaves like a minimalist Mark Rothko. 

Ultimately it is refreshing and remarkable to find a contemporary artist like Andreas Gefeller with this kind of visual imagination and ability to translate that to the photographic plane. The future looks limitless.

*1 Interview with the artist, Sept. 2009

*2 (www.jmcolberg.com Sept 8, 2008.

*3 Henry Peach Robinson—“Pictorial Effect in Photography”, 1867

Parts of this essay were included in a presentation at The Somerset House in “Photography Discussed” in 2009

©2009/2021

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