SETAREH Berlin is pleased to announce Sebastian Riemer's solo exhibition Das Ende des XX Jahrhunderts.
Sebastian Riemer's Stills are concerned with obsolete things: 35mm slides used for teaching and research in art history during the 20th century. This series explores a medium that is in the process of disappearing. These are not snapshots taken and seen only in private. What you could call the series' raw material comprises labelled, often mass-produced, professional images, which Riemer then photographs. This process results in semantically dazzling large-format pictures.
The images might give the impression that they have been meticulously constructed; their pictorial elements are seamlessly intertwined. The slide showing Caspar David Friedrich's Mountain Landscape with Rainbow depicts a surreal crescent moon when rotated 90 degrees. The decomposing pigments make the landscape disappear. On its left and right edges, inscriptions suggest the wings of a triptych. Caravaggio's Narcissus (rotated 180 degrees) already explores the theme of mirroring and doubling as it is—and so does an early Mondrian painting. Others, like René Magritte's famous pipe painting, become the stage for Riemer's network of meanings: this is not a pipe, and it definitely is not a slide.
The originals come from a practical academic context. First attempts to incorporate slides into art history lectures were made in the 1870s. By the end of the 19th century, slide projection had already become a permanent fixture in lecture halls. Comparative approaches are essential to this field. Would Heinrich Wölfflin's studies of outline and form, of Italian and German styles have been possible without double projections? Perhaps. But it would have been all the more difficult.
Press release courtesy SETAREH.
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