Gosbert Adler | Thomas Hauser. Amalgamate

About

In the series Girls Seen (2013-2016) and Jessica Standing (2015-2016), Thomas Hauser continues his portrait work. Employing a consistently stringent visual vocabulary, he develops his idea of female beauty literally as a confrontation, a juxtaposition, with the high resolution of large-format exposures. 

In the two multipiece typologies of body expositions the genre boundaries of nude, portrait, and still life dissolve. The simple gesture of showing reveals, together with the young women’s seemingly classical, yet sometimes disturbingly liberal poses, alternating between exposure and concealment, the dubiousness of mass-media-multiplied ideals of beauty.

While Hauser time and again replays comparable image formulae with different models, Gosbert Adler, in the work Return to Reason (2018), investigates the full range of human relations in the image of their various acts and stances. What do gestures convey of a person’s relation to his or her environment? How do people position themselves to one other? More to the point: what image do they present? 

Adler’s images of man are derived from scenes equally fictional and actual. They reflect forms of human interaction from conversation to intercourse. The series and sequences aim at the - individually perceived -exemplary: like contemporary formulae of pathos, they render processes and emotions comprehensible. 

Text: Carolin Förster
Translation: Johannes Sabinski