until 05.05. | #3384ARTatBerlin | Galerie feinart berlin shows from 24th March 2022 the exhibition “Faces of life” with works by the artists Manfred Carpentier, Michael Dressel and Dieter Matthes. Their interest in people, especially people in the big cities of the world – this connects the works of the three photographers. What sets them apart is how they make us perceive the world in their images.
With Manfred Carpentier, Michael Dressel and Dieter Matthes, three personalities meet in the exhibition who are also privately on friendly terms. Their photographs share an interest in people, especially people in the big cities of the world. What sets them apart is how they make us perceive the world in their images. Their photographic concepts cover a broad spectrum between inwardness, Street Photography and an idea of people and urban space as an artistic entity.
Manfred Carpentier, „Screaming“, Selfies 2017 © Manfred Carpentier
Manfred Carpentier, born in 1954 in Gerolstein (Eifel) and 2010-2018 director of the Galerie Carpentier, raum für kunst in Berlin-Charlottenburg, is a photographer himself. In his “Selfies” series, he makes himself his own model. The expressive portraits, which are created using a remote shutter release, appear like stills of an uncompromising self-questioning. If you follow their titles, they appear like studies of human states: “Guessing”, “Screaming”, “Being amazed” – and always the question: who am I? It is, as if the photographer was dissecting himself with his camera. In his “Expressionism” series, he interprets poems by the German Expressionists Jakob von Hoddis and August Stramm. Both series address the dissolution of the self and the over-complexity of the digital age with its vast range of identities and “images”.
Michael Dressel, Hollywood 2020 © Michael Dressel
Michael Dressel, born in East Berlin in 1958, stage designer, arrested after trying to escape over the wall and imprisoned for two years in a Stasi prison, found his way to Los Angeles at the age of 27. For years, during which he worked as a sound editor in numerous renowned Hollywood films, he photographed people on the city streets who were on the fringes of society. A tension that is difficult to classify between uncertainty, yes, alienation and at the same time the feeling of being close to these irritating, lost, marked people and recognizing their dignity – this is what makes Dressel’s work so fascinating.
Dieter Matthes, Streetlife Buenos Aires 1994 © Dieter Matthes
Dieter Matthes, born in West Berlin in 1952, worked for nine years as a specialist in internal medicine and classical homeopathy. In 1970 he began to deal intensively with photography. From 1989 he concentrated on it full-time, initially with assignments for Stern, ZEIT-Magazin, Focus and Forbes, among others, and accompanied reports all over the world, e.g. about New York, Montevideo, Eastern Orient Express and Bangkok. In addition to other projects, between 1995 and 2000 he was one of the main authors of the “Blickwinkel” column in the Berliner Tagesspiegel. His “Metropolis” series appears like a kind of international character study of big cities: a study of concrete, steel and glass, of visual axes fleeing towards the sky and a living space that consists almost entirely of architecture. Dieter Matthes often leaves his protagonists in an anonymous space, but there are also shots in which they establish an emotional connection to him: an intense gaze, a fleeting touch, a child watching the photographer. Especially the series “Childhoods” looks for such moments.
An article on the exhibition will be published in brennpunkt. Magazine for photography, issue no. 02/22 (April-June).
Vernissage: Thursday, 24 March 2022, 17:00 to 21:00, at 19:00 introductory speech by Maria Wirth.
Exhibition dates: Thursday, 24 March to Thursday, 5 May 2022
Finissage: Thursday, 5 May 2022, 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
To the Gallery
Exhibition Faces of life – Galerie feinart berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst Berlin – Contemporary Art – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin