Earlier Work

Most of the images in Satellite City were made during a stay in Mexico City. Portraits of people sit next to architecture, animals and plants, among them chayote, turtles, mameys, a tule tree and tripe against a pink wall.

The photographs are placed inside digitally constructed rooms and layered until figure and ground interleave. Thom Bettridge reads these peeled and contorted surfaces as a way of pointing to a picture’s own apparatus, its capacity for illusion.

The series was shown in 2015 in “Welcome to the Jungle” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, on triangular panels set on rollers that could be moved through the space, and at Klemm’s, Berlin, in “The Human Apparatus”.

For Today’s Lies, Tomorrow’s Truths Roman Schramm has constructed a display system in bright blue and orange. The triangular shapes of the four modules create a kind of parcours, guiding the viewer through the exhibition.

At the centre of this structure one finds the image of a couple in front of a building – a man facing a woman, looking slightly to the side. The couple recurs in several other works, interacting in various ways. The image resembles a film still – a classically staged scenery. Throughout the exhibition, one is confronted with different genres of photography, as Schramm combines techniques ranging from macro photography and 3D collages, to portraying a self-made play dough sculpture. The objects on view – be it a cactus or a computer-generated graphic structure – resemble protagonists of a suggestive story line, staged within the individual images as well as in relation to one another.

The exhibition architecture makes it impossible for the viewer to gain an overview, and placed on wheels, the modules suggest a potential transformation, and new points of perspectives.

Press release, Croy Nielsen

Roman Schramm shows a series of newly produced photographs at Kunstverein Hildesheim. Schramm’s portraits of objects and people, as well as the abstract, fully digitally generated three-dimensional structures and forms, play with images and their potential to express, shape and produce culture and self-understanding. This play continues in the exhibition architecture, made specifically for the rooms of the Kehrwiederturm.

Schramm’s photographs of everyday objects such as sneakers or hole punches stage things anew. They combine colors, angles and material with relish and move the objects out of the dimension of use entirely and into that of contemplation. He proceeds like a painter who uses color, texture and the illusion of space to produce images that keep reshaping the relation to the visible world.

Schramm works with the full range of pictorial representation and moves through the image traditions of art history as well as advertising. His images have a strong autonomy. They put the understanding of photography and its relation to the world under tension and push the idea of images as representations of the visible world to its limits.

Adapted from the press text, Kunstverein Hildesheim