Museum Ritter: Laurenz Theinert. Missing Darkness

The exhibition provides a fine insight into Laurenz Theinert’s oeuvre, which includes photographic works, light art and light + sound performances. In addition to five light installations, the exhibition also features photographs from various of his series.

In his work, the Stuttgart-based artist strives to create a reduced visual language that develops without any recognisable reference to the objective world. He is not interested in depicting reality in his photographic work. His photographs do not document things; they are neither narrative nor do they represent anything. For Theinert, the visible world is merely a starting point that allows him to use the means of photography to investigate the medium itself, as well as processes in space and time, such as changes in perspective or changing colour effects. His research, which is more intuitive than planned, results in images of great creative lucidity.

In his Randerscheinungen [Peripheral Phenomena], Theinert reverses the photographer’s conventional gaze: instead of concentrating on a central motif, he focuses his attention on the usually insignificant margins of his visual field. In the multi-part series Every Now and Then and Tagundnachtgleiche [Equinox], he examines for instance changes in colour in different light situations. And in the series Farbreste [Leftover Colours], his concern is with visualising colours that are present in even the greyest of greys in a concrete wall or stretch of masonry, enhancing them by means of digital image processing to create psychedelic colour compositions.

The desire to create dynamic, dematerialised art led Theinert to light art. Using light as a medium, he has succeeded in creating changing colour effects and intimating movement. Theinert’s walk-in Farblichtraum [Coloured Light Room] exemplifies this with its seemingly gently pulsating walls, as do the works Awakening and Gespinst [Weave] which change with the rhythm of the light. At the same time, these white luminescent installations enter into a dialogue with existing architectural structures, which are sometimes sharply outlined and emphasised, and sometimes visually broken apart and redefined. The fact that light art always creates new spatial experiences is impressively demonstrated in Laurenz Theinert’s work.

On the cover: Every Now and Then, 2008 (3 out of 7 images) © Artist, photo: Laurenz Theinert

Source: Museum Ritter