Kentauren­bilder

Photographs by Florian Merkel 2010 – 2016

Florian Merkel

The work Centaurs Project in 2010 markedFlorian Merkel’s return to his photographic roots following a long break during which he worked on various performance and video projects. Centaurs Project 1 picks up on earlier series of landscape photographs; the images have a documentary look while at the same time addressing a subjective sense of experiencing public space – an arrested temporal feeling dominates the elements shown. In Centaurs Project 3, this logic is taken to the extreme – the social surroundings are eliminated to such an extent that nothing more than a bare sketch of a condition remains. In 2013, the artist’s suspension of this type of image generation led to the series Magenta, in which he plays with the influence the factor of time exerts on the physical change a photographic print undergoes and the interpretation of this process as an electronic simulation of history. He additionally shows more recent portraits, a current block of architectural research and older and more recent hand-coloured photographs.