June 20 - July 19, 2002

Irmel Kamp and Simone Nieweg

architecture/landscape

Margarete Roeder Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent photographs by Irmel Kamp and Simone Nieweg from June 20 - August 2, 2002. A reception for the artists will be held on Thursday, June 20, from 6 - 8 PM. Irmel Kamp (born 1937, Düsseldorf, lives and works in Aachen) will show black-and-white photographs of various architectural buildings and situations in Tel Aviv, Florence and Brussels from the 1930's. Kamp, who has practiced as a photographer since 1977, works exclusively on long-term projects focussed around a locale and/or group of buildings. The subjects are as varied as the sheet metal facades of early twentieth century industrial buildings in eastern Belgium, to the high modernist residential and commercial architecture of Tel Aviv. This latter group, perhaps Kamp's best-known project, was the subject of a book published by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, Tübingen/Berlin and a touring exhibition that originated at the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart. Initiating the program herself, Kamp brought attention to an under-examined area of modernist architectural history. These superbly formal images, precisely composed and faithfully rendered, may remind the viewer of classic documentary photography-yet there is something else at work here in the delicately grisaille images of the past century's constructions, histories, economies, and memories.             By way of formal and thematic contrast with the work of Kamp, Simone Nieweg (born 1962, Bielefeld, lives and works in Düsseldorf) will show recent color photographs devoid of all architecture. But these images are not devoid of human intervention. The photographs, from two ongoing series "Gardens" and "Landscapes" are redolent with signs of human intervention, whether addressing the suburban and peripheral gardens or allotments, or almost-manufactured farmland. Always without any human presence the photographs attest to the profound human intervention in those neglected, interstitial areas, neither urban nor bucolic, that exist in the populated and industrialized areas around Düsseldorf. An exhibition of these works at the Huis Marseille, Amsterdam will travel to Berlin and Siegen fall/winter 2002-2003, an accompanying catalogue has been published by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, München.                           Despite the initial formal disparities in Kamp's and Nieweg's work it is rather the connections and rapport between the works that are most clearly identifiable. Both artists eschew the simplistic documentary mode of photography for a richer, more complex and resonant mode. Rather than deliver severe factual records the artists informed by their own sensibilities meld fully characterized portraits. For further information and photographs , please contact the gallery. TOP