»Meta-Icon«

Prologue. Photographic Access to the World of Pictures

Marc Bonnetin, Frank Eickhoff, Heike Gallmeier, Mirko Martin, Noé Sendas

Photography is currently the scene of an accelerating co-optation of the established pictorial worlds of western culture from painting, photography and film. A growing number of artists using diverse strategies and forms of representation are transforming important domains in our collective, cultural pictorial memory in new works. The originals remain present in the works created, whether in direct recognition or as a vague echo of a specific, familiar aesthetic. Nonetheless, these creatively free replicas are different. They are truly novel and the hubris of the ‘uncannily familiar’, of ‘impaired recognition’ makes them subtly confusing and disconcerting. The individual appropriation of the artists presented implants what is novel, still alien, in the visual canon of the culture with which we are familiar. A survey of the group exhibition should show how differences in subject matter, concept and technique shape this appropriation and how the artworks created are able to become unique meta-icons.