Berlin

Barbara Probst

12 Moments

28.4. –10.6.2017
  • <p><em>12 Moments</em>, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei</p>

    12 Moments, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei

  • <p><em>12 Moments</em>, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei</p>

    12 Moments, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei

  • <p><em>12 Moments</em>, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei</p>

    12 Moments, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei

  • <p><em>12 Moments</em>, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei</p>

    12 Moments, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei

  • <p><em>12 Moments</em>, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei</p>

    12 Moments, 2017; Kuckei + Kuckei

Kuckei + Kuckei is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by New York based German artist Barbara Probst.

Barbara Probst studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and photography with Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. She began her career with sculptural works, then moved on to three-dimensional installations that included photography, and finally, since the year 2000, to the multi-part photographic works, the “Exposures”, which brought her international renown. Her “Exposures” are always composed by a group of photographs. At first glance they appear mysteriously connected, yet without revealing their secret. Closer observation reveals that they all portray the same scene and have been taken in the same second, but from very different angles. For Probst this fragmentation of the instant into a series of images is the tool for exploring the many ambiguities inherent to the photographic image. In her work the relationship of the photographic instant to reality is intensified in two distinct ways, whereby the captured moment acquires an almost unsettling quality: on the one hand, Probst abandons the single-eyed gaze of the camera and divides it into various points of view. On the other hand, she multiplies and diversifies the short moment of the shot. Thanks to a radio-controlled release system she can simultaneously trigger the shutters of several cameras pointed at the same event or subject from different angles and various distances. From each angle the gaze of the camera gives us a different view of the same reality, thus revealing all its subjectivity.

In this exhibition we will show her recent series of diptychs entitled 12 Moments, where the artist starts each of these with a single actual dream image or memory of an experience, and then proceeded to find a second picture to accompany it. Instead of relying on different accounts positioning camera in opposite views, she has reconfigured her generative eyewitness analogy, so that the camera now serves as a highly personal and emotional note-book for recording her own intense images. In this group of works, Probst presents her visual suggestions by undefined recollections, putting in front of viewers a real visual enigma, that the artist considers universal enough to resonate with different gradients of perceptions and knowledge.

Barbara Probst, born in Munich in 1964, lives in New York and Munich. In 2015 her work has been shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in the exhibition Perfect Likeness: Photography and Composition; in 2006 at MoMa in New York in the New Photography exhibition series. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, among others 2014 at Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague and at the Centre Pasqu’Art in Biel, Switzerland; in 2013 at The National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen; in 2009 at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh and Kunstverein Oldenburg, Germany; in 2008 at Domaine de Kerguehennec, Bignan, France and The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin and in 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book with an essay by Robert Hobbs, the well-known American author, curator and art historian, published by Hartmann books.

see artist