UTA NEUMANN | Sights

Opening: Friday, 10 July 2009, 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 11 July - 1 August 2009

In Uta Neumann's exhibition Sights, we are following her to various travel destinations - Australia, England, Italy and the U.S.- and discover the photographic moment of pausing as the common denominator. The work reflects her trust in the existence of things and in the uniqueness of the moment. 

On her journeys, Uta Neumann reveals to us the essence of the social limits/conditions. She does not only increase her visual awareness, but also the visual awareness of the observer. She follows the trail of society’s constantly changing structures. In this process she approaches the supposed contrast between Nature and Culture, where the boundaries between the wilderness of urban spaces and artificial landscapes blur. We encounter not only remote places but also forgotten objects. The objects are not unfamiliar to us, but the newly created relational structure makes visible the usually inconspicuous. 

By using a variety of visual means, Uta Neumann moves constantly around what is “no more” and what is “again”. It is a suspicion that creeps through her pictures like a ghost. It is the suspicion of absence guiding our gaze to what, in its aesthetics, seems pervasively blank and aborted: the relationships of human beings to Nature - a recurring theme in Uta Neumann’s photography. It is easy to discern how she evokes the beauty of the incidental, the beauty of the moment. It is the use of forms of quietness and clarity and also the language of the relation to the objects. Her eye for peripheral places, which enter our life for a moment of dialogue, is captivating in its sobriety. 

This relation becomes apparent through her view, moving from the right to the left side, passing the actual centre. She takes us - the observer - to places that she has discovered on her own and that we now jointly look at. However, this sense of unity is an illusion. As only the observer can complete the associations the picture evokes. Uta Neumann openly shows her view on human beings and landscapes, her distant discoveries, that she shares, but made on her own - for the moment alone. 

In her photographs, Uta Neumann unifies the banality and the complexity of everyday life, she sides with the objects, with moments and, finally, with the visual of the moment. It is the coincidence or the magic of a peripheral moment that the artist adopts in order to achieve a distance from the stringency of the medium. 

Susanne Weiß, freelance curator, Berlin