Jeff Cowen
Capturing Eclipse
19.09. – 01.11.2015

From September 20th, the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven will be showing a solo exhibition of works by the New York artist Jeff Cowen, who began taking photographs in the streets of his hometown in the late 1980s. He worked as an assistant to Larry Clark and Ralph Gibson, but in the course of the 1990s his artistic approach changed radically due to intensive studies in the areas of drawing and painting. This period had a lasting impact on the artistic search for the relationship between the photographic image and abstraction. His photographic works, which are created in the darkroom of his Berlin studio, move on the border between painting, photography, drawing and sculpture. Like the color in painting, he uses the chemicals in his darkroom, develops the compositions and also gives the sometimes uncontrollable processes their freedom. The development from the photographic image to the individual and painterly print can take months or even years. The process is partly consciously controlled, but not predetermined. Cowen is looking for something that he does not understand rationally, but that he senses and knows exists. For him, photographs are not a technical means of visual archiving. Rather, he is interested in the fundamental artistic possibilities of the medium.

In a new series of works, which is now being exhibited for the first time in Bremerhaven, the artist deals with the photographic depiction of darkening, shadows and partial fade-outs. The focus on what is not visible or only indistinctly visible negates the actual function of the medium, which is to objectify the experienced and seen environment for others. The event of a solar eclipse is an exception here, since the dazzling celestial body can only be seen in clear outlines through the filter of the moon. The fade enables a clear view of the essence of the image. Photography is a transformative process, for the observer and the observed. In the images of this new series, Jeff Cowen pushes the reference to reality far into the background and at the same time calls for alternative approaches to the medium. “Like silence, my photographs can be described above all by what they are not.” (Jeff Cowen)

Sebastian Neußer

Curated by Dr. Kai Kähler.