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until 06.09. | #2736ARTatBerlin | Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung shows from 26th June 2020 the exhibition Cristal réel der Künstlerin Isabelle Le Minh. The exhibition period was originally planned for 2 May to 21 June 2020.
With the first presentation in Germany of the exhibition Cristal réel by the German-French artist Isabelle Le Minh (*1965), the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation’s archival work, which normally remains hidden, comes into its own: the inventory of approximately 20,000 photographs and the restoration of 1,000 glass plates. This archive work not only provides the humus for further art historical research, but also provides inspiration for new artistic discourse.
A number of contemporary artists have already taken up the challenge of dealing with Alfred Ehrhardt’s work. But never before has Ehrhardt’s work been interpreted so intensively, directly and profoundly as by Isabelle Le Minh. Her new work is part of her After Photography group, in which she reinterprets the works of master photographers and questions their creative methods. After her involvement with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, she is now followed by Alfred Ehrhardt.
© Isabelle Le Minh / ADAGP, Paris 2020 || © Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung
Isabelle Le Minh addresses the photo-historical conditions and photo-theoretical backgrounds of photography by conceptually highlighting partial aspects of the photographic archive in her artistic work. To this end, she chose Alfred Ehrhardt’s Crystal Photographs, one of his most fascinating collections, consisting of 600 photographs and 400 glass negatives. Not by chance, because Le Minh studied crystallography before studying art – she also understands the world of regularly formed crystals from a scientific perspective. The exhibition title Cristal réel is a term of crystallography and describes imperfect crystals as they occur in nature.
The exhibition is based on two new series: Crystal clear and Cristallogrammes. In Crystal Clear, Le Minh combines Ehrhardt’s negatives, including their defects and retouching, with photographs of landscapes found on the Internet of the respective places of origin of these crystals. The artist plays with the ambivalent character of photography: on the one hand it is a factual document, on the other hand it is a subjective construction; on the one hand Ehrhardt treats crystals as scientific objects of research, on the other hand he makes them objects of his aesthetic world view.
Cristallogrammes is a series of photograms in which small, abstract constructions made from photographic archive materials are placed on photosensitive paper in such a way that in their final form they look like crystals.
The crowning highlight of the exhibition is the photograph of an arrangement of crystallography books that has been thrown up to form a sculpture and which at first glance looks like a crystal photograph by Alfred Ehrhardt:
© Isabelle Le Minh / ADAGP, Paris 2020 || © Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung
Opening: deleted
Exhibition period: Friday, 26 June – Sunday, 6th September 2020
Events accompanying the exhibition:
Date not yet known: Artist talk with Florian Ebner, Director of the Photographic Collection at the Centre Pompidou, Isabelle Le Minh and Sonia Voss, curator of the exhibition.
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Exhibition Isabelle Le Minh – Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
