KATHRIN SONNTAG

Thomas Erben Gallery is excited to present its first solo exhibition with German artist, Kathrin Sonntag, whose practice encompasses photography, sculpture, film, and installation. Her work was last exhibited in New York at the Guggenheim’s Photo-Poetics during winter 2015/2016.

Playfully disrupting viewers’ perception, Sonntag’s work sows confusion across space, time, object, and architecture, blurring the line between photography and reality. Her exhibitions frequently incorporate the sites her works are exhibited at, using life-sized photographic wallpaper and careful installation to transfigure the exhibition space into a zone of heightened perception.

With ‘Problem and Solutions’, an ongoing photography series by the artist, Sonntag has been documenting examples of makeshift solutions made by ordinary people for quotidian problems. The photographs capture a provisional character–ad-hoc, inventive, sometimes crude solutions that Sonntag wryly chronicles, speaking to the (immediate) questions of life.

Bearing the same name, Sonntag’s exhibition itself ultimately shares this provisional appeal. Working at the gallery for the show during August, Sonntag photographed a range of whimsical setups, using objects at hand in the gallery to display a selection of images from her series. The results were transferred 1:1 to photographic wallpapers, which–displayed with corresponding objects–re-enter the gallery’s space.

By creating unusual solutions to the problem of presenting ‘Problems and Solutions’, the installation echoes the makeshift character documented in­ the photographs, redoubling: this is how we’re going to tackle this problem for the time being.

1. Antje Havemann & Ḿargit Schild. ”‘You Can Use My Tights’ or: The Phenomenon of Temporary Solutions.” Landscape Research, Vol. 32, no. 1 (February 2007): 45-55.