Ralph Hinterkeuser

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Ralph Hinterkeuser (* 1959 in Bonn ) is an artist living in Berlin and Molmerswende . He uses high-resolution photography to depict urban and scenic situations.

life and work

After an assistant with Walter Schels in Munich, Ralph Hinterkeuser studied photo / film design from 1983 to 1988 at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences , where he organized the 1986 symposium on photography photographers filming . He continued his photography mediation with two exhibitions at the Stadtmuseum Siegburg : Knut Wolfgang Maron - Pictures about Landscapes (1991) and In the Light of Shadows - Photography and the Present of the Past (1993, with Susanne Greven, Kapa, ​​Wojciech Prazmowski, Salvatore Puglia) before he focused on his own photography.

He creates various documentation for architects and artists, such as In 2012, for example, the extensive monograph StahlWerk for the steel sculptor Karl Menzen .

Ralph Hinterkeuser deals with certain regions in his independent work groups and follows their changes, e.g. B. through architecture and resource acquisition. In the Lille Métropole complex, for example, the transformation of the urban face of the northern French city through globalization ambitions is a theme, while the work City & Zone shows the Azerbaijani capital Baku under the influence of the oil industry. More recent works show landscapes and cities on the water.

The large-format images resulting from these recordings are characterized by a wealth of detail, a rather reduced, warm-toned color palette and a particularly concentrated and calm, classic-looking image structure (narrative documentarism) . In addition, a theatrical staging characterizes many of his works.

The following quote from his text on Lille Métropole shows that he is well aware of this impression :

“I saw myself in changing productions and now answer them with my own. I add my pictorial to the plastic, built statements. The resulting abstraction of the functional building structure deprives them of part of their power to overwhelm. It makes their reality more tangible and more vulnerable. My photographs of a city in transition into another age use the vocabulary of the theater. There are stages and backdrops and brochures here as there. The performance location is either classically designed from the front, or one looks into a peep-box stage. There are occasionally, as nostalgic reminiscences, historicizing backdrops, some modernistic or existentialistic ones, including those from a bygone era, and there are futuristic ones that represent the present. There are different scenic lighting, however, in keeping with the unromantic theme, of mostly sober effect: daylight is diffuse, artificial light is produced with fluorescent tubes. Clouds or a blue sky are only sometimes used to create a special artificiality. One could suspect the influence of Brecht. So stages are shown that do not hide their functions, that are under renovation, how unfinished. Or the actual stage is hidden behind partially transparent roller blinds, made inaccessible. Slogans of political theater appear ('TOYS' R 'US'), or billboards shout their message indecipherably into the stage landscape for the viewer. In aseptic rooms, the observer himself is followed by surveillance cameras and catacombs, which make Piranesi's nightmares a reality, put the acting friend into claustrophobic states. (…) An eerie silence fills (…) the scenery and one feels the instinctive tendency to go to safety. But where? It is nothing but the reality that I show in my pictures. Reality? What reality? Where am I? What am I doing here?"

- Ralph Hinterkeuser : City under Influence - Built symbols between decline and utopia

In addition, both the juxtaposition of opposites and the transitoriness are again and again foils of Hinterkeuser's images. From a conversation with Prof. Dr. Kai Uwe Schierz: “I do not ban the appearances by reducing them, but rather by trying to pack as many - also contradicting - appearances as possible into one picture. So not to resolve the contradictions, but to let them coexist - the beauty and the repulsive, the very fleeting and that which lasts for a long time, what is in the process of being built up and what is already passing away. It was always in my head that I would like to put all of this together in one photo in a kind of cinematic movement at the same time. (...) It is not my intention at all to reduce the world to certain formulas and forms. It is bad enough that others do. I rather document their fight against chaos. Their futile struggle. However, I am also not interested in photographing reality. Nobody can photograph what is real. (…) I sometimes have to take a bath in the sea of ​​phenomena and draw from it images that are able to point to the richness of the phenomena in their full breadth and contradiction. "

Exhibitions (selection)

Ralph Hinterkeuser took part in the following exhibition:

  • 2001: Landscapes / Paesaggi , Marcovaldo, Caraglio (with Jocelyne Alloucherie, Alain Balzac, Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Franco Fontana, Karen Knorr, Stephen Roach, Michel Séméniako) and Racconigi, Piemont, Italy
  • 2001: Lille Métropole , commissioned by the Mission Photographique Transmanche of the Center Régional de la Photographie Nord Pas-de-Calais , Douchy-les-Mines, with the Goethe-Institut Lille, France
  • 2001: RaumBilder , Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning , Bonn (with Jürgen Hohmuth and Michael Schroedter)
  • 2002: Aux marges du paysage , Institut franco-japonais de Tokyo (with Lewis Baltz , Marilyn Bridges, Thierry Girard, Fumimasa Hosokawa, Kunihiko Katsumata, Philippe Lesage, Tamaki Motoki, Masatoshi Sakamoto, Jacques Vilet)
  • 2002: Fifty: Fifty - built and non-built architecture for Berlin 1990 to 2000 , Berlinische Galerie in the art forum of the Grundkreditbank, Berlin
  • 2004: transit. Erfurt, Lille and other theaters , Kunsthalle Erfurt

Prices

The artist received the following prizes, among others:

literature

  • Lille Métropole , Mission Photographique Transmanche - Cahier 25, Center Régional de la Photographie Nord Pas-de-Calais, Douchy-les-Mines 2001
  • Landscapes / Paesaggi , Marcovaldo, Caraglio 2001
  • RaumBilder , Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning , Bonn 2001
  • Architecture as a backdrop , in: Photo magazine 4/2002 (about Lille Métropole )
  • Fifty: Fifty - built and not built architecture for Berlin 1990 to 2000 , Berlinische Galerie 2002
  • Windows and Mirrors , in: Can photography capture our time in pictures? 25 years of Bielefeld symposia on photography. Ed .: Gottfried Jäger , Jörg Boström . Bielefeld 2004
  • Kai Uwe Schierz: Transit Erfurt , Kunsthalle Erfurt 2004
  • Karl Menzen: StahlWerk. (undated, 2012, photographs from the artist's monograph)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ralph Hinterkeuser: City under influence - built signs between decline and utopia (PDF; 44 kB). In: Lille Métropole
  2. ↑ Conversation with Prof. Dr. Kai Uwe Schierz on the exhibition Transit. Erfurt, Lille and other theaters , performed in Berlin on May 26, 2004 ( PDF )
personal data
SURNAME Hinterkeuser, Ralph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn , Germany