The photographic representation of the human body and the body’s role as medium and motif in the creation of visual art are the defining themes in the exhibition bodies & surfaces. The juxtaposition of two highly distinctive artistic positions engenders a dynamic field of visual correspondences and interactions on the level of content, lending the exhibition the appearance of a work of installation art.

Manuel Carreon Lopez’s series Akte employs photography to examine the representation of bodies in visual art. The artist takes photographs of himself in his studio as he tentatively strikes expressive poses and experiments with pictorial compositions. His body is the instrument and physical stuff of his art as well as the object under scrutiny in his quest for a contemporary body image. Like the human figure, the resulting photographic images then become materials he arranges in carefully designed displays and presentations, heightening their density by assembling series and manufacturing objects.

Ernst Miesgang’s creative engagement with photography probes the limits of the photographic equipment as the artist seeks ways to work with the physical qualities of the medium itself. This approach also underlies the series of body studies SCINS, for which Miesgang uses a document scanner he modified in order to be able to capture larger structures. The defamiliarized depiction of bodies produced by the device and the presentation of the images in large light boxes undertake an investigation into our sense of familiarity with our own bodies and their translation into pictures.

This exhibition was part of the project “eyes on” European Month of Photography 2016.