Susanne M. Winterling

Fotogalleriet proudly presents the exhibition Complement for Company (skyline and skin) by the German artist Susanne M. Winterling. For the exhibition at Fotogalleriet the artist has created a new body of work that explores the relationship between photographic image, experienced space and subjectivity as it plays out in the aftermath of Modernist theories of vision and architecture.

As a point of departure Winterling assumes an analogy between the window and the camera. Informed by Le Corbusier’s notion of the house as a frame for the view, she radically inverts the famous Modernist architect’s idea by attaching a framing device to the exterior of Fotogalleriet’s front windows. Thereby she turns the gallery space itself into a photographic image, pointedly twisting his ideas of inside and outside, window and view. What one looks into, is a grey room that merges floor, wall and ceiling into a one-dimensional surface to become the “skin” or photographic paper for the various elements presented in the space. Metaphorically using the site-specific framing device as an entry into the gallery space, the installation also playfully comments on continuous art historical debates on the framed picture as a window to another world. Clearly visible from outside, however, Winterling counters the grey gallery space with a large-scale photographic wallpaper that depicts Oslo’s skyline by night. This site-specific installation thus acts both as framing device and window, looking out into the same city in which Fotogalleriet is located.

The wallpaper is set against the films, photographs and sculptural objects in the gallery space, which have been carefully placed to heighten their material and everyday qualities and which carry traces of personal history and experience. Bordering between documentation and fiction, Winterling explores the photographic apparatus as an extension of her eyes and senses. Whereas the automatic camera registers space by a highly formal approach, the inevitable subjectivity of photographic image making is here emphasized – and the viewer is invited to fill the part as a subject in the process. Complement for Company (skyline and skin) is a playful investigation into the process of photography and its selective decisions taken within the context of the institutional space.

Susanne M. Winterling (born 1970 in Rehau/Oberfranken, Tyskland) lives and works in Berlin. Winterling has exhibited widely internationally, and has participated in exhibitions such as at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf / Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westphalen (2010), Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Konsthall Malmö (2009) and the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2008). Recent solo exhibitions took place at Centre d’Édition Contemporaine, Geneva, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen and BAWAG Foundation, Vienna. Winterling has recently been appointed Professor of Film, Video and Photography at the Academy of Art in Oslo.

Susanne Winterling
Complement for Company (skyline and skin)