Laurenz Berges – Installation Sentimentale

About

Laurenz Berges is known for his works in the area of tension lying between documentary sobriety and melancholy. Marked by an atmosphere of change and abandonment, his pictorial narratives reveal the absent. 

His series of works Das Becherhaus in Mudersbach was shown in 2023 as Laurenz Berges. Maintaining and Disappearing at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen and was presented to the public for the first time. An extensive publication accompanied that exhibition. 

In this 45-part series, the artist captures the traces of past lives. The uninhabited Becherhaus in Mudersbach provides the setting: During the course of a considerable period of time, Berges familiarizes himself with all the facets of this house and documents the intimacy of its unchanged state. The title of the exhibition Installation Sentimentale picks up on the special presence of the photographs, whose motifs seem like installations. 

It is the details of the captured sections of space that make the past tangible, contoured by the light of different times of the day and seasons. The melancholy in Berges' works is neither transfiguring nor romanticizing. The artist’s visual language of form is characterized by a clarity that defies modern demands for ready answers and quick readability instead pursuing an exploration of meaning. 

Laurenz Berges (*1966 in Cloppenburg) lives and works in Düsseldorf. Works by the artist have been presented domestically and internationally, including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, SK Foundation, Cologne, Mecanic, Barcelona, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Musée d`Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Fotohof Salzburg and Haus der Kunst, Munich. A selection of the work series Das Becherhaus in Mudersbach will be on view in the Photographic Collection of the SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne from November 2023.