Déjà vu

Curated by Sonia Voss.

Kehrer Galerie is pleased to present two positions from France. Thibault Brunet and Isabelle Le Minh, whose works have been exhibited in French institutions on several occasions, both deal with the reactivation of images and play with our collective visual culture.

Thibault Brunet (b. 1982) describes himself as a »photographer without a camera«. One of his fields of experimentation is the video game »Grand Theft Auto«, whose space he explores to create dreamy images that have more in common with the visual heritage of Romanticism than with the aesthetics of video games (»Vice City«, 2007–2013). In another series, he works with images of isolated buildings in suburban areas, modeled in 3D by their own inhabitants and found on Google Earth. Through the process of appropriation, Brunet builds a typology that unfolds in a subtle chromatic palette (»Typologie du virtuel«, 2014–2016). More recently, in the context of a partnership with Leica, Brunet drove along the Opal Coast in Northern France with a 3D scanner. The »photographic« images extracted from the data, in spite of the very technical process, confer to the landscapes a profound sense of unreality (»Territoires circonscrits«, 2016–2017).

Isabelle Le Minh (b. 1965) deals with the theoretical, artistic and technical history of photography. One part of her work is called »After Photography«: it comprises the series «Objektiv« (2015), a collection of photographs of old camera lenses that form a typological homage to Bernd and Hilla Becher. »Trop tôt, trop tard« (2008) refers to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the »instant décisif«. The artist removed the human figures from the iconic images of the French master as if these had been shot »too early« or »too late«. »Darkroomscapes« (2012) are pictures of developer trays that were taken in the darkroom – for the artist a meditative space ruled by »analogue« time – that remind us of the contemplative »Seascapes« of Hiroshi Sugimoto.