Albrecht Schäfer

preview on Friday, June 24 th, 2005, 7pm - 10pm
exhibition June 25th - August 6th, 2005
opening hours Tue - Sat 11am - 6pm


Galerie Kamm is pleased to present Albrecht Schäfer (*1967) with his third solo exhibition in the gallery. Albrecht Schäfer develops his work at the intersection between found architectural situations or material conditions and their alteration by means of artistic interaction.

For the work "White Window", the large shop window of the gallery will be painted on the outside with white paint. This clear division between inner and outer collapses as soon as the first passer-by or gallery visitor leaves their mark on the white surface which can easily be removed. The constantly expanding graffiti gives rise to a complex interplay between interior and exterior, between actor and viewer.

The installation "Ausschnitt", arises from the reconstitution of the gallery space to a previous architectural state. The plasterboard-covering inserted, in the course of renovation, to straighten out a transitional arch, will be sawn out by the artist and hung upside down just under the original position. With this gesture Albrecht Schäfer carries out an archaeology of the architecture by bringing a prior condition back to the surface, and making it visible.

The site-specific works will be extended by a series of paper cut-outs from newspapers. In these, Albrecht Schäfer transfers his central questions to a two-dimensional visual support. By cutting out the printed and illustrated sections, all those parts disappear, as far as possible, which are normally encountered during the daily reception of newspapers. What remains is an apparently well-thought-through abstract geometric composition, and isolated sentences robbed of their context.

Through his architectural and material interactions, Albrecht Schäfer leads our passive reception back to active observation, not limited to the artwork itself, but inseparably including the environment or the starting situation. On the level of material as much as form, the works arise more as a result of the displacement and manipulation of the existing, than the addition of new objects, making visible the overseen or concealed.