As an artist that consistently realizes stunning photo-based work which explores the relationship between time, language and image, we are thrilled to present his newest research in the context of this important festival.

Many of Philipp Goldbach’s works are in collaboration with institutions, creating space for an intellectual dialog to take place, in which artworks become open channels for this conversation. Goldbach draws attention to questions around authorship and reproduction (themes that are re-contextualized by the camera), by engaging closely with the works of other artists. For Goldbach, photography is understood as a line of communication that lends itself to its own rules and conventions. The shaping of photography is a collective act, where, its images become objects of its own reflections on the past, on photographic history, and its everchanging status as an art form, recent and modern.

In his latest project, Philipp Goldbach engages in a dialogue with the work of artist Lucio Fontana. The opening of painting into three dimensional real space, introduced by Fontana in his 1940s „Concetto spaziale” („spatial concept”) where he sliced and pierced through his canvases, is taken up by Philipp Goldbach with photographic means. To do so, the artist uses one of the oldest techniques of analog photography, the photogram: a camera-less image realized by an object being placed on photographic paper and exposed to light. Lucio Fontana’s radical expansion of painting is echoed in Goldbach’s examination of his originals by putting them in direct physical contact with the analog photographic material. The slices of negative space are realized as spectral positives, a black figurative presence that echoes Fontana’s radical incisions. These works have been developed with the consent of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana and in collaboration with international museums such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museum Folkwang, Essen and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

Philipp Goldbach has taught as Assistant Professor for Photography at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (2008–2009), as Docent for Film and Photographic Studies at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) of Leiden University (2017–2019) and as Visiting Professor for Photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2022). He was a member of the curatorial team at Simultanhalle Cologne and is part of the artist group darktaxa-project. Select exhibitions include kjubh Kunstverein, Cologne; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Museum of Ruhr -University, Bochum; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.