06 Dec 2010

Miklos Gaál: Selbstvergessenheit at Galerie WAGNER + PARTNER, Berlin

The exhibition title refers to the mental state of immersion, void of directed and intentional thought but being open to the surroundings as an undifferentiated whole. Selbstvergessenheit affirms the possibility of enjoying events unexplained.
Gaál's photographic thought reconsiders the ways in which photography is presented, read, and received. The exhibition is a collection of singular works from recent years including photographic prints, a hand printed artist book, a slide show and a silkscreen series that make up a playground in which the viewer's relationship to photography is placed in the foreground.

Key works in the exhibition include:
Viewing an Apple Tree is a silkscreen-printed artist book displaying a singular photograph of a blossoming tree. The source image is divided in sections of the same size and are each shown on a page spread of their own. Each of the nine spreads presents a random sample of the view, rich in detail, with the occasional appearance of the imperfections characteristic of the hand printing process, creating a non-narrative spatial split from the original image.

Surfacing is a series of collages combining silkscreen printing with black-and-white laser photocopies. A grayscale layer is printed in silkscreen on top of prints of a singular photographic image by mixing colours accidentally while printing. The partially transparent monochrome washes cover and unveil the image behind, resulting in a series of prints that are each unique. The series juxtaposes the instinctive, charged element of pigment with the directed photograph. While the aleatory silkscreen layer appears as simple traces of pigment, it responds to the photograph by shaping the formation of the waterscape. The chance relationship between these two printing processes lends a degree of ambiguity to the resulting images.

Hillside is a wintery vista of an urban recreational area. It is a continuation of a body of work of scenic images applying altered photographic focusing and elevated viewpoint, reinterpreting everyday scenery, moments and practices. In depicting a suspended action the vagueness of the scenario itself comes into view. Avoiding any spectacular moment is one of the characteristics of the body of work as a whole, which is interested both in the momentary idleness of the action itself and in the act of looking.

Echo is an image sequence that documents an incident in which an amount of water is trapped inside a bus window between layers of glass. The water is in constant movement as the bus is driving, drawing a line responding to the landscape passing by. The observation of the fleeting event is presented casually as a slide show emphasizing the experience it evokes rather than the physicality of the work.