Matthias Hoch "Stadt. Fotografien 1986-92"

About

In 1986, when the black-and-white photographs from the "Stadt" (City) series were taken, Matthias Hoch was still studying photography at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts. The photographs show deserted places, factory buildings, lonely roads and the facades of the compact old building districts, which were severely neglected in GDR times, almost fell into disrepair and were only renovated after the fall of the Wall. Matthias Hoch countered the omnipresent gray with a strict pictorial aesthetic. The pictures are taken from the perspective of a passerby, the light is diffuse, the sky white. These formal decisions bring out all the more precisely the material qualities of the buildings, the bare branches and the uneven road surfaces. In his photography from the second half of the 1980s, Matthias Hoch documents not only architectures and technical constructions, but also always the concrete historical situation, the downfall of a failed state.

Still in black and white but already a harbinger for his color photographs in the series "Nacht" (Night), is the photograph of the Löffelfamilie in Leipzig, a historic neon sign, which was also put into operation to counteract the dreary color scheme of the GDR. In the environment of the Leipzig art academy, color photography around 1990 was considered as too gaudy coarse and banal; for Matthias Hoch, it was also a way of depicting reality: "Color that would be a completely normal component of the image, an informative addition, not kitsch. Which opened up for me the possibility of representing peculiarly dissonant or achromatic, grayed color constellations as they really appeared." (MH, 1990) Matthias Hoch tested this possibility first in night and twilight photos taken in Leipzig and East Berlin. Artificial light sources shape the character of these images, with hues that shimmer between blue, green and magenta, reinforcing the abstract quality of the scenery.

To this day, Matthias Hoch devotes himself to abandoned, vacant, and uninhabited sites on a project-by-project basis, most recently in a project about the half-finished Berlin Brandenburg airport (BER). Matthias Hoch was born in 1958 in Radebeul near Dresden. He studied photography at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts (1983-88) and received scholarships from the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome (2003) and the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris (2018). He lives in Leipzig. His works are in public collections, including MoMA, New York, Albertina, Vienna, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and Berlinische Galerie, Berlin. It’s his second exhibition at Nagel Draxler after the exhibition “Matthias Hoch/Olaf Nicolai: Depot/Landschaft” in Cologne in 1997.