Jenö Gindl
New Works
26 April – 8. June 2019, Opening: 25 April, 6-9 p.m.
Introduction: Jochen L. Stöckmann (around 7 p.m.)

Jenö Gindl’s third solo exhibition at Galerie Poll focuses on a series of works in black and white created in 2018: Kallitype prints show, among other things, an overturned glass, a women’s boot with a high heel, a telephone box on the wall of a building, or a palm tree on the side of the road – all mounted on transparent Japanese paper allowing the stretcher frame to shimmer through as a cross.

These motifs are combined with object labels or captions as are usually found in exhibitions or catalogues, noting the title, year of creation, dimensions, and origin of the artwork. Both elements are meant to be perceived together as “one picture” which does not create a familiar reality but confronts the viewer with questions. Does the information on the labels belong to the motifs above? How should the titles and provenances they communicate be understood? Why is the construction of the frame visible? Jenö Gindl calls this series “Americans”. This could be read as a reference to the famous Swiss photographer Robert Frank, who had used a Guggenheim fellowship in the 1950s to travel throughout the United States and explore the rural parts of the country behind the glossy backdrops of its cities.

In the exhibition, Gindl juxtaposes his transparent panels to white, opaque canvases as reversals. They contain roughly pixeled portraits of women, anonymised by white stripes over individual parts of the face and combined with hashtags, as is common in social media: #girl, #immigrant; #gun, #fashion, or #terrorist. Images of women are tagged with catchwords for asymmetric warfare: “Badly Armed Enemy”, “Hostage”, or “Target”. In the series “Oracle”, a portrait of a woman is mounted four times on a canvas. The portraits deviate minimally from each other through small interventions, thereby playing with the myth of photography as an “authentic” image.

For his works, Jenö Gindl draws on a large pool of his own photographs, while also using materials he takes from elsewhere, such as film stills. All the works being shown deal with human perception, including the large-format palladiotype “Twins” (2015) with the double image of two pairs of eyes. They can see everything.

Jenö Gindl, born in Göttingen in 1962, studied art history and history at the Free University of Berlin before going on to study art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he graduated in 1992 as a master student of Wolfgang Petrick. In 1989, while still a student, he began collaborating with the Steidl publishing house in Göttingen on special book projects in a lithography workshop he specifically set up for this purpose. Since 1994 Jenö Gindl has been running a studio for photography in Berlin with a focus on high-quality photographic printing processes.

An edition will accompany the exhibition.