Flo Maak - Seascapes

About

Flo Maak (b. 1980) studied at the Frankfurt Städel School with Wolfgang Tillmans and Willem de Rooij. Since early 2013 he is visiting professor for art photography at Chung-Ang University, Seoul, South Korea. Seascapes as images of the sea usually depict the unsteadiness of ships at sea often with no reference to land. This transient state of a solid body shown at the surface of a solid framed painting - or the juxtaposition of fixed and liquid, form and formlessness - is the pervasive theme of Flo Maak's second solo exhibition at Bernhard Knaus Fine Art in Frankfurt. The show includes new collages and photographs, as well as a series of "Displaced displays" that are all related to the central installation entitled "Surface Interference Study (after Courbet)". This installation consists of a collection of so-called "Shopper-Stopper", double sided A-boards, which are set up to form an abstract model of a wave. On each side of the room dividing line-up, a monitor is mounted into an A-board, on which a camera pans across details of Gustave Courbet waves pictures. These monitors show the surf waves as if being carved out of stone, while the shore appears as liquefied. This dialectic between dissolution and materialization which characterizes the sea both as actual place and metaphor permeates all other works gathered in the exhibition. In a booklet published on the occasion of this show the philosopher Daniel Loick describes this subject as follows: "Maak points out a conflict that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called the game between territorialization and deterritorialization. The process of turning an undefined area into a classifiable, predictable and controllable terrain is never fully completed, and not determinable, but remains a battle of the order of antecedent forces of disorganization and decomposition." For more information about the exhibited works please visit: http://www.bernhardknaus-art.de/Flo_Maak_E.html