Ideal spaces of Julian Faulhaber. 0+

The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography presents the first Russian exhibition of the German photographer Julian Faulhaber.

The exhibition presents works from the LDPE project (low density polyethylene), on which Faulhaber worked for several years, starting in 2003. The name itself manifests the artificiality of the captured spaces. The synthetic material used for the production of plastic bags becomes a reference to our everyday life, when packaging often becomes more important than the product itself. “This is the lifestyle that defines our day,” notes the author.

Faulhaber focuses on the really existing public places in Germany, Japan and the USA: gas stations, shopping malls, cinemas, car parks - that surrounds us every day. He takes pictures of these objects at a stage when their construction has already been completed, but the design has not yet been commissioned and the user has not yet violated the ideality of the just created by his presence.

The work process turns for the author into a study and takes quite a long time. Faulhaber very carefully selects objects for shooting, looking for ideas while walking around the city, leafing through architectural and design magazines and browsing the Internet. Having chosen a place, he observes all stages of the construction of the structure until its completion. “This is also part of the workflow - monitoring the development of construction, changing surfaces. It’s like working in a studio on a painting that changes every day. ”

Completed and unused constructions are so perfect that they seem designed on a computer. However, the buildings appearing in the frame are fixed in their natural state. The author intentionally refuses any digital processing and does not use additional light sources. He shoots on a large-format camera using a slow shutter speed, so the images are extremely detailed. Spaces devoid of human presence resemble theatrical scenery, in which the action will unfold from any moment. Geometry, rhythmic lines, color saturation, emptiness and tightness of the frame create a feeling of tension in the composition and internal drama.

The author’s works rightly correlate with the work of the most prominent representatives of the Dusseldorf school of photography, Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Strut. A striking phenomenon in the history of art, the class of Byrd and Hilla Becher helped to form a number of outstanding authors of conceptual photography. In Faulhaber’s works, the viewer finds the same interest in architecture and public space, a special attitude to the color and rhythm of the composition, attention to detail and maximum detail characteristic of the “Düsseldorfs” who in the 1970s and 1980s turned the world of photography, incorporating it into the context of contemporary art. The author himself admits that he was a fan of their work while studying at the Department of Photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Dortmund.

Julian Faulhaber is a laureate and nominee of many photography awards, such as the Reinhart Wolf Prize (2006) and the Körber-Award (2007), Saar-Förderpreis für junge Kunst (2006) and the Real Photography Award (2006), as well as the Deutsche Prize Börse (2010, 2014).

The author’s photos have been published in many magazines, including the Art Forum, The New York Times Magazine, Damn Magazine, Foam Magazine, and Departure Magazine, and are also included in the book by photography researcher, professor of Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA) Andres Mario Zervigona, “Photography and Germany ”(2017).

The works of Julian Faulhaber are in major private and state collections, including the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA), the art museums of Harvard (Cambridge, USA) and Princeton (Princeton, USA).

The author will come to Moscow and personally open the exhibition on January 30. January 31 at 19:00 Julian will conduct a tour of his exhibition for everyone.

With the support of the Goethe Institute in Moscow.