Ingo Mittelstaedt . CHROMAS

29 October - 17 December 2011

Ingo Mittelstaedt: Bunte Löcher #1, 2011, c-print, 120 x 100 cm, courtesy Galerie koal

The longer we contemplate the scenarios of Mittelstaedt’s photographs – so painstakingly assembled from painted cardboard and ‘objets trouvés’ – the more they coalesce into puzzles, charged with energy, and consisting of planar and three-dimensional elements. At times, it seems as though all distance between object and camera lens has been eliminated.

More markedly and more deliberately than earlier, color plays a fundamental role, and compositions are dominated by luminous blue, red, and yellow surfaces. Through this painterly articulation of the photographic image, one that incorporates aspects of color doctrine and theory, Mittelstaedt alludes to classical modernist painting and its self-referential preoccupation with color, surface, and line.

Just as in the medium of painting, where the elements visible on the canvas themselves increasingly became the focus of attention, Mittelstaedt’s photographs severed all links with objective reality in order to generate autonomous worlds. The ultimate image has been pieced together from mirror effects, distortions, and reflections which can no longer be disentangled from one another, and which exist as illusion only within the photograph itself. The works of the CHROMAS series are more dream than reality, more fantastic than real.

Ingo Mittelstaedt (*1978) currently lives and works in Lemgo as a stipendiary of the city. In 2009, after finishing his art studies at HBK Braunschweig, he was among the awardees of "gute aussichten - junge deutsche fotografie". His works will also be featured in another solo exhibition at Kunstverein Langenhagen this December.

www.galeriekoal.com