Kerstin Flake, Benoît Grimbert

The exhibition “Kerstin Flake / Benoît Grimbert”, brings together two international positions whose intellectual affinity is perhaps only apparent at second glance. Kerstin Flake stages bizarre plays as director and stage designer in one person. While the laws of physics only seem to apply to a limited extent in her picture series, Benoît Grimbert’s precise photographs resemble an almost archaeological investigation of urban spaces. In his works, he forges links between the places depicted and the biographies of iconic personalities such as Ian Curtis, Nico, Jim Morrison and Charles Manson, thus confusing temporal layers. The result is a conglomerate of pop culture myths and the history of photography, which seems to evoke inner images and at the same time deconstruct them. In Kerstin Flake’s enigmatic arrangements, artifacts that have mostly fallen out of time enter into a dialogue with one another. She playfully mixes the past and the present, aiming to dissolve perspective and meaning through the use of basic photographic techniques.

kerstin Flake

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Kerstin Flake, “Shaking Surfaces #9, 2020”, from the series: “Shaking Surfaces”, 2018–2021

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Kerstin Flake, “Shaking Surfaces #9, 2020”, from the series: “Shaking Surfaces”, 2018–2021

Kerstin Flake finds her “playgrounds” in abandoned apartments, in empty stores, on lonely beaches in the Baltic region, in lackluster cities of the American »Midwest« and in the architecture of the Bauhaus Dessau, where the artist was a guest at the Meisterhaus Muche in 2022. Kerstin Flake designs large and small scenarios, in which she sometimes also incorporates herself into the carefully constructed set. Although she relies on precise depiction using analog and digital recording methods, she playfully overcomes the laws of gravity in her pictures. Long exposure times set objects and people in motion and allow them to merge with one another. Calculation and chance complement each other in the artist’s performative interaction with “lifeless” things, which she seems to breathe life into. The individual wall works in different sizes and formats enter into a dialog and relationship with each other as the image series “Fake Spaces” (2006–2009), “Shaking Surfaces” (2018–2021) and “Unsteady Stages” (2022/23) with freestanding objects and expansive video installations and create a finely textured network of vibrating, rotating movements, a choreography of almost spooky moments in which everyday objects are thrown off kilter and swirl ghost-like through the stage space.

Benoît Grimbert

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Benoit Grimbert, “Palm Springs”, from the series: “Horse Latitudes”

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Benoit Grimbert, “Los Feliz, Los Angeles”, from the series: “Horse Latitudes”

Benoît Grimbert also focuses on urban scenes as stages for multi-layered historical processes and narratives. By means of precisely composed, documentary-like photographs, he not only conducts a precise, visual investigation of built spaces and landscapes in his works, but also embarks on a search for clues that is as metaphysical as it is criminalistic. In his most recent work, “Horse Latitudes” (2014–2023), Jim Morrison’s and Charles Manson’s ­legendarily linked biographies become the pivotal points of a narrative about a not-too-distant but highly mythical past that blends the results of his photographic explorations with historical text fragments and pop-cultural artifacts. The images that feed this narrative meander somewhere between documentary fact and spiritualist ghost photography. They show crime scenes whose dead have long since disappeared into the Hades of pop-cultural mythology and make use of a photographic language whose references are probably as iconic as the legendary protagonists that Benoît Grimbert seeks to approach artistically.