Thomas Kellner will be present at the opening on March 4th from 7 to 9 pm. Opening hours through March, 19th, 2023: Wed. - Fri. 4 – 7pm, Sat. 11am – 3pm and by appointment. Opening hours from March 19th, 2023 to June 2nd 2023: by appointment only.

 Max Misselbeck, curator of the Scholl Foundation Cologne, introduces the new series by Thomas Kellner. 

 With “Half-Timbered Houses of the Siegen Industrial Area Today”, by Thomas Kellner, the  artist of the same name follows in the footsteps of Bernd and Hilla Becher and the search  for the intersection of documentary and artistic photography, of objective distance and  penetrating closeness.  In her contribution to the catalog on the half-timbered houses, Andrea Gnam aptly  summarizes the extent to which the artist altered his photographs to conform to the  Bechers' artistic-documentary paradigm. First, she says, he subsequently stripped the  photograph of its color and transformed it into a black-and-white shot with colorful details.  The monochrome half-timbered house is joined in color by situational remnants of  everyday life, such as a car, a few flowers, or a bucket. The contrast is further achieved in the picture by a background that remains blurred and directs the focus solely on the building. By playing in this way with the technical means and possibilities of today and neither  emulating the black-and-white photographs of the Bechers too much nor leaving the color  photography entirely without intervention on his part, Kellner emancipates himself from  the artistic models of this series of works and finds his own more or less objective view of  architecture. The half-timbered house as a whole is unquestionably in the foreground of the  pictures, but special attention is paid to the accentuated everyday objects that characterize  the house as an object of use. It becomes clear that the building is inhabited and filled with  life. It is all the more interesting that Bernd and Hilla Becher dispensed with such remnants,  even deliberately bypassed them. The Bechers visually systematically fixed industrial culture and illustrated analogies and  differences of architectural buildings of the same function and made of the same building  material in compiled tableaus. The organizing principle pursued by the artist couple was  thus a design and visual typology according to construction and function correspondences.  While they were thus interested in a comparative seeing within their works, Kellner  ventures the step of juxtaposing his pictures with Becher's photographs, a cross-work  analyzing as Gnam calls it. The artist thus focuses not only on the present condition, as has already been mentioned,  but above all on the changes that the half-timbered houses have undergone in the last 50  years. His pictures are as much a reflection of a condition as of a process, one more reason  for Thomas Kellner to break with the artistic attitude of the Bechers at certain points. The  photographs of the half-timbered houses reveal changes in social and residential history,  are mirrors of current society, of Siegerland's residential culture and architecture, and of the spirit of the times. However, their subsequent processing, the colorful details and the  blurring in the background, also point photo-technically into the 21st century and document the further development of photography and its processing methods. Thus, the question is  no longer which photographs are more neutral and object-oriented, but rather what they  convey and how they interact, in other words, what visual comparison makes visible.