SUSA TEMPLIN

Susa Templin’s first exhibition at Galerie Kornfeld is the result of our close collaboration with Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt am Main. We are delighted that together with the artist we have put together an exceptional selection of her layered works reflecting both her current practice as well as her previous artistic journey for Berlin.

Susa Templin’s work moves between media and transcends boundaries. The trained painter found her medium in analog photography, yet, like a sculptress, she uses photos of architectural structures to create spatial installations and three-dimensional objects by layering two-dimensional images, which emerge from the wall like sculptures in space and time.

Susa Templin’s works are based on her archive of photographed spaces. As she confessed in an interview, her “paintbox” does not include brushes and oil paint, but this ever-growing collection of photographic images. In her studio, she combines the various photographs in a sculptural fashion, arranging them in space. The images overlap and sometimes eclipse each other, resulting in carefully constructed compositions, which she then photographs. The photos carry traces of the real, while always revealing something new: a never-before-seen reality immanent to the image.

The series “Berlin Barock” has not been displayed in the capital since an exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie in 2007. Here, analog photographs are reassembled in three dimensions: pictures of backyards in Wedding are juxtaposed with images of glittering, glamorous window displays on Kurfürstendamm, revealing pictorial spaces that cannot be rationally resolved, creating a dizzying new reality. The four images from “Constructions, Linienstraße” (2018), also designed with models in the artist’s studio, show how a new reality emerges from the stacking and folding of different images and the deliberate use of light and shadow.

While these images of spatial layers remain two-dimensional, the artist’s more recent work includes photographic images of overlapping and layered objects and spaces that detach themselves from the surface: in “Bent & Folds” from 2019/20, the photographs are applied to an image carrier that is subsequently bent and deformed, the image protruding from the surface into space.

In “Spatial Abstraction” (2022), by contrast, several image layers spatially overlap in two large glass boxes hanging on the wall: a colorfully constructed photographic image appears as an (associative) architectural spatial structure on the inside of the acrylic glass box. At the same time, it functions as a semi-transparent layer in front of the photographic print behind it, which is attached to the box’s back wall. Combining photographed and real spatial layers, the image is “doubly exposed” and thus becomes a three-dimensional object that allows viewers to discover ever new perspectives on the same work.

Finally, “Glass in Glass” (2019) detaches itself completely from the wall and stands as an object in space. The photographic image, again printed on semi-transparent and later deformed acrylic, becomes a three dimensional sculpture. A photo of bare branches and twigs on a curved windshield is transformed into an actual disc curved into space, placed next to Galerie Kornfeld’s terrace door to partly obscure the view of the garden at Fasanenstraße 26, surprising the viewer with another perceptual reality.

Susa Templin (* 1965, Hamburg) studied experimental film and painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin (now UdK, Universität der Künste) from 1987 to 1993. Since then, she has been exploring the spatial qualities of photography in expansive installations. In ever new series of works, the artist deconstructs and reconstructs photographed space in analog and digital form, exploring its third and fourth dimensions.

Her photographic, partly walkable room installations have been shown in renowned national and international institutions, such as Kunsthalle Mannheim; Berlinische Galerie - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin; Fotogalleriet Format, Malmö (Sweden); Kunsthalle Nürnberg; MAM, Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (Brazil); Museum Folkwang Essen; Goethe-Institut Washington D.C. (USA); the Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt and the Biennale des Images in Paris (France). The artist’s works can be found in numerous public collections, including the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; the Berlinische Galerie - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin; the Kunsthalle Mannheim; the art collection of the DZ BANK and the photography collection of the Historisches Museum, both in Frankfurt am Main; as well as the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt and the Sammlung Zeitgenössische Kunst des Bundes, Bonn.