Artists

Karl-Heinz Klopf

Press release

The works shown by Karl-Heinz Klopf deal with issues such as urbanisation, globalisation or digital and media entanglements and are contrasted with the exemplary social space of the individual. The exhibition in which he is presenting films, photographs and installations from the last forty years, begins with the early photograph, K, from 1981. It is a quasi-autobiographical piece confronted with two concluding video stills from his most recent film project, Nesting Endless, that was made in 2021 during Covid lockdown. The film is a homage to the Austro-American artist and architect, Friedrich Kiesler. In between those two poles there is, for example, the long-term project, Streets, (begun in 1996 and ongoing) a photographic project which engages with spatial orientation in the artist’s various temporary living places. A selection of around thirty photographs is spread over multiple gallery walls like an urban skyline.

Klopf’s approach of interlinking spatial structures with architecture is also expressed in the custom displays and arrangement of the exhibition. A room-in-room installation consisting of glass elements, a spatial support and a projection box, creates its own architecture, which holds a group of works. An ensemble consisting of the photo series, Chrystie Street, and the early Super-8 film, Typing on the Windy Film Set (both 1987), as well as the computer animation, Studio (2000), point up the multiple references to real, digital and fictional space. The artist not only reflects and documents the physical and structural of built surroundings but also the wide-ranging changes that recent technology has introduced in the form of the digital data networks or the Internet as abstract social architecture. Even now, Environments, a film from 1998, still represents a fascinating survey of the early expectations and promises the Internet as an infant medium meant for the global User:community.