Matthias Leupold. Staged Photographs 1983 - 1995

About

Born in East Berlin in 1959, he lived there in the district of Prenzlauer Berg until his emigration to the western part of the city in 1986, where he has been working on pictures since 1983, staged with actors and directed counter worlds to everyday life in East Germany. His research and examination of their norms and conventions led him to look for images of "reality behind reality" and topics that lie outside public and propagated self-assurance.

In the exhibition we show a selection of individual works of the staged photographs from 1983-1995, as well as the series "Fahnenappell" and "Die Schönheit der Frauen".

The opening speech will be given by Ekkehard Maaß, who founded the Literarische Salon in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg in 1978 and became one of the most important meeting places for a generation of artists, who, 10 years before the end of the GDR, had abandoned their socialist ideology. 

In his series of works, Leupold explores manifestations of picture groups and their social references. In 1988/89, he initiated the Flag Raising Ceremony – Staged Photographs of The Third German Art Exhibition in Dresden 1953, to analyze the year 1953 artistically. Thereby, the pictures of this strict beginning of the formalism debate are taken up and restaged photographically. In 1994, Leupold succeeded to exhibit his visual criticism in the Military Historical Museum in Dresden, where he first began his career. His work hung in the same house in which this far-reaching demonstration of power took place in 1953. Another black and white picture series is inspired by the ideological content of the German magazine Die Gartenlaube (Editor: Ernst Keil) and restaged with effortful characteristics, backgrounds and current clothes.

Aside from his series, Leupold photographs numerous frames. Actors, models and laymen made chances for his camera productions. Personal and socially relevant topics like solitude, homecoming, protection, neediness, abundance and waste, as well as current events are reflected.

Some of his photographs make specific content references to a novel by Robert Musil Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities).

Matthias Leupold stayed in the German Academy, Villa Massimo in Rome, from 1997-1998. The mostly color photographs, which were taken there, are characterized by observations of southern light on chapels, sculptures and Madonna Portraits.

Most recently, he strayed from his staged photography roots, and roamed into the realm of documentary, creating a full-length film about Vietnamese veterans and their families in the aftermath of Agent Orange usage in the Vietnam war (2012/13).

Matthias Leupold represents a unique figure in the artistic landscape. This is expressed in his contributions to the exhibitions: Art in the GDR, Berlin National Gallery 2003 and Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin 2004, in Moscow 2004,  portraits and scenes1980-1990 in the Akademie der Künste 2009 and Geschlossene Gesellschaft in the Berlinische Galerie 2012.

When it comes to defining Leupold's work and elaborations, one summarizes in three polar tensions: between statics and dynamics, between contemplation and narration, between comic and symbol. In the pictures, these dimensions and categories do not fall apart but merge partly or completely together.