Nina Pohl
June 2–July 30, 2005
Munich

In her large-sized photographies, the artist Nina Pohl embarks on the strategy of subversive beauty: Photographies, which inflate nature in the sence of a seemingly romantic inwardness, concurrently describing it as a place of alienated staging. An obscure apple tree, draped all over with apples, imitating an endless galaxy, shining in a gloumy red. Down to its bole one will find the traces of the imperishable prosperity trash.

An endless brown winterwebbing from a climber named: the longer the better, which- in its never ending ramification- keeps on grabing more and more objects of wealth- the mountain bike. Or the water fall. Here the bodies of water resemble an atomised milky way, in which the colored visitors stare into the ridiculousness of their existence.

These stagings create a transforming line between a meditating "soul landscape" in the sence of romanticism and the indications of a site of crime, announcing the disomfort of our present time. The surreal effect of the different atmospheres within the picture is even enforced by the seeming objectivity of the subject's perspective. This will become clearer, regarding an early landscape piece: green overlaping mountains; a highway bridge cuts through the middle of the picture. This fragmentation comments on our world of medial reality. Nature functions as the matrix of material staging, embodied by soldiers wearing camouflage under the spotlight of a filmsetting, happening in the green hell.

From painting to photography to painting.

Setting up medial realities, Nina Pohl heads for the lifelike landscapists of the 19th century, emancipating the photographic material from its medial reality in the presence. Thereby her previous question concerning fact and fiction and her romantic affirmation continues consequently. The contemplative landscape format is heightened into a breathtaking panel format.The emerging blank position is continued with the own photography containing indications of our civilizations. A chromatic power of the enlargement, originating from the oil painting's spectrum touches your sences. The gleaming white reflections of the reproduction's light sources produces different entanglements between its apparent objective reproduction and its affirmative affection: adducing the pictorial light source of the moon, the sun, at the same time refering to the two immanent points of perspectives: reproduced and made up lanscape versus the photographic act, illumination, staging.

This piece turns the auratic moment of the landscape motive into a fetish and keeps the arrangement of attempt within the structur of the photography transparent without depriving it from its claim for reality.

Nina Pohl will have a two-sided article in VOGUE`s August edition.