Karen Linnenkohl | Sabine Linse | Richard Schütz. Deep Surface

About

Do increasingly precise observations and ever more exact investigation methods not lead to a fathoming of ever finer folds of a nevertheless opaque surface? Which - by the way - raises the question: is there at all something which lies beneath, or is it just an increasingly deeper folding of the surface? What do we really percieve of this surface? What do we select, what do we add by interpretation? How much more what we consider to be perception is shaped by our expectations, so that is it much more the reflection of our imaginations than an unobstructed reception of the percieved?

Deep Surface does not offer any answers to these questions, but picks up on the already existing confusion and invites you to engage further. The works of Karen Linnenkohl, Sabine Linse and Richard Schütz each engage enticingly and differently with the abysses, confusions and imaginations that appear as soon as we receive sensory impressions.
Karen Linnenkohl's photo installation is concerned with remote spaces and objects that have accumulated over time. From things that were accidently set aside, to those which have been forgotten, and traces that have survived generations and which have in part been replaced and covered by newer versions.artist works with the medium of the snapshot, the seemingly coincidental photograph. Here, many things remain suggestively open, out of focus, unrecognisable to the very end. It is left to the viewer to pick up the offers of recognition, to interpret the vacancies themselves and make sense of the respective situation. 

Sabine Linse's productions are permeated by a puzzling, absurd atmosphere in which the connection between the familiar and the unfamiliar creates an alliance between the comic and the uncanny. Their imagery is determined by a logic akin to that of dreams: causal and chronological connections change abruptly with symbolic and associative ones. The Unexpected, the Strange - they appear with the semblance of an almost harmless normality. The previous interpretation routines slip, the naive certainty of unbiased perception breaks and the viewer is stimulated to create new readings.

The laconic absence of a picture narrative is characteristic of Richard Schütz's photogaphs. The viewer is confronted with the presence of abandoned constellations, decaying classification systems and a disturbing experience of emptiness in the omnipresence of objecthood. Yet there is a fragile balance in the way that everything in the picture comes together and consists of Not-Yet and No-Longer-Being.