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EXHIBITION: WILHELM SCHÜRMANN - PHOTOS FROM GERMANY at Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany

Wilhelm Schürmann was one of the central personalities in the developments of photography in the 1970s, not least in his role as co-curator of the In Deutschland. Aspekte zeitgenössischer Dokumentarfotografie [In Germany. Aspects of Contemporary Documentary Photography] exhibition at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn (1979, together with Klaus Honnef).

But he was also a dissenter to a certain extent: Schürmann took strictly composed, stage-like photographs depicting how things actually were in his immediate surroundings, in cities and on their outskirts. His works are systematised according to thematic references, and as his recently published book Wegweiser zum Glück, Bilder einer Straße 1979-1981 [Road Map to Happiness: Pictures of a Street 1979-1981] (Cologne, 2012) again demonstrates, he often worked through in them in an extremely complex manner.

But each picture is more an individual photograph than part of a serial arrangement: every situation demands an individually developed compositional solution. The sensuous intellectual pleasure taken in the subtle codes and messages of the object constellations sets limits to serial and systematising methodologies.

The selection of photographs presented in this exhibition shows Germany as an impassive region between crisis and crisis, as a ongoing provisional arrangement woven out of estates of terraced houses, industrial structures with a sprinkling of modernist elements, backyards, garages, church towers, power supply lines, highways and railway station situations. But these temporary arrangements nevertheless still possess subtle remnants of anarchistic possibilities: they are potential docking stations and options for the futures.

Wilhelm Schürmann, born in Dortmund in 1946, has been taking photographs since he was 16-years-old. He studied chemistry, established the Galerie Lichttropfen with Rudolf Kicken, left it in 1977 and taught art photography from 1981 to 2010 at the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen. An initial encounter with Martin Kippenberger in 1982 laid the foundation for Gaby und Wilhelm Schürmann’s activities as collectors: his passion remains object constellations. (+)

Exhibition dates: Aug 14 - Nov 24, 2013

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