© Philipp Keel - Below the Surface, 2007
Camera Work Gallery Kantstraße 149 10623 Berlin Allemagne
CAMERA WORK is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Philipp Keel from December 7, 2013. The exhibition will show an exclusive selection of the artist’s photographic work and invites the recipient to discover his fascinating Oeuvre, which combines conceptual and abstract photo art.
More than 100 million pictures are uploaded each day on Facebook worldwide, the number of pictures taken in Germany sums up to over 200 million a day. This development and its consciously critical examination are the starting point of the conceptual self-understanding of the artist Philipp Keel. If one understands the overwhelming quantity of pictures as a medial parallel reality that mostly intents to preserve its true image, Philipp Keel’s works need to be understood as a deliberate antagonism resolving from this parallel reality: personal, paradox, unconventional thinking.
© Philipp Keel - Shark, 2013
It is not Philipp Keel’s intention to portray reality. He rather changes the apparent reality through wilful surge, distortion, but also reduction – he suggests reality to sensitize the observer’s view. This way of exaggerating – the form of lily pads or the play of colours of the Sierra Nevada, in a way only Ray Ban can see them – demands the absorbing subject to experience the fascination of a subjective interpretation of reality.
From light and form arises art – for Philipp Keel both are indispensable elements that need to be synchronized. Nevertheless, the work demonstrates this esthetic consciousness, which enters the microcosm of everyday life and renders perfect beauty made up by partly bizarre trivial photographic work of art. Hence, the play between the pulps structure of a melon and its seeds in the series Watermelon Seeds develops into an intensive experience of color and form. The level of abstraction is always brought to a point, in which the reception and the subjective assimilation of the shown including its (ir-)real esthetic are being possible without hindrance. It is what it is – but different.
© Philipp Keel - Studio Ghost, 2011
Alienation as an esthetic instrument is not only content but method. This adaptation of form and colour becomes apparent, for example, in the work Below the Surface. Water is a recurring element of Keel’s Oeuvre, which can be traced back to the time he spent in California. His series Air Mattress underlines the influence of this element.
Renouncing every prior mise-en-scène and neglecting motives on account of its esthetic or referential function, the artist sets the beginning of a work steadily at a point of time where a moving moment catches up with him: when driving a car, swimming or ruminating. In this special moment of experience Philipp Keel lets himself drift away and creates an image of his feeling. Therefore every work accommodates an autobiographic facet and consequently is a reflection of his own and his own perception. The subsequent phase of the originating process is marked by a subtle disassociation up to abstraction. With an emphatic devotion to detail, the moment, which is "projected" on the means, is to be developed according to the esthetic sensation. A phase that can take up to one year, until the shape is reached that lets the artist rest.
© Philipp Keel - Sierra Sunset, 2004
© Philipp Keel - Ray-Ban Series One, 2010