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  • Exhibition

Fassade und Tarnung | Facade and camouflage

7 April – 18 May 2018

Scope Galerie
Calenbergerstraße 12
30169 Hannover

Opening hours: Friday and Saturday, 12am to 17pm

Opening: Friday, 7 April 2018, 7.30pm
Introduction: Maik Schlüter

Press release on the exhibition "Fassade und Tarnung" / "Facade and Camouflage"

Ute Behrend plays the game of visual and symbolic overstretching: she always questions the supposed stringency of her narrative by omission, creating a variety of meanings. For the photographer, reality is a kind of raw material that only becomes real in the image, in abstraction, in the transfer into illusory spaces, the showing of non-places or the dissolution of spatial relations. Real, however, in the sense of absurd, abysmal, enigmatic and constantly changing processes.

Like a forensic scientist, she reassembles the world, the crime scene, in order to find some meaning in the pieces of the puzzle. Some fragments seem to fit together seamlessly, but in reality they are located widely apart in space and time. Then again, visual analogies feign functional proximity and a coherent context, although neither exists. Everything appears as a hidden sign or clue, a logical next step in uncovering an invisible order. Yet the picture never completes itself. Ute Behrend's photographic spectrum consists of laconic descriptions of places, abstract settings that sometimes emphasize graphic qualities, as well as situational moments of tension, portraits and installations. Ute Behrends works always show the ambiguity of the world and its images. Spatial structure and projection, portraits and installations become a spiral of relativity. There is no such thing as absolute interpretational sovereignty over her work.

In Ute Behrend's work, colours and forms, nature and culture, destruction and beauty, personality and role-playing all appear with equal significance. In her work, constancy and change go hand in hand. Everything happens on the thin ice of the experience of reality. While her visual language seems clear and direct at first glance, the supposedly universal vocabulary conceals many secrets and deceptive visual abysses.

Maik Schlüter 2018

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