Photographs on Photographs

Ingo Gerken

In his work Offenes Buch (Open ReSource), Ingo Gerken focuses on historic and contemporary works of photography. Gerken creates arrangements from photographs taken in the reading rooms of universities and art libraries over the course of several years. Operating at the interface between artistic everyday life and art-historical research, Gerken has scoured the magazines of contemporary art and market activity as his formal contextual arena, interpreting classic monographs and glossy catalogues as intellectually open terrains for poetic expansion or critical commentary. Poised between homage and subversion, composed and documented ‘on site’, the work consists of a series of small interventions that emerge for a brief moment directly alongside (and together with) their literary source. Gerken’s art continually reflects and questions its own situation and conditions of production. Moreover, his work thrives on the use of ambivalent quotes, art-specific references, samplings and remakes, but above all on an unobtrusive quality of precise improvisation.