The exhibition by Albrecht Schäfer focuses upon an engagement with the „inner logic“ of objects and situations. It functions as a crucial and integral part of the final work and of the process of its production. The material treated in this manner is rather minimal, such as pages of newspapers, paper lampshades and other industrially fabricated everyday objects. They reveal underlying and previously hidden layers of meaning through a process of disclosure, dissection and clipping.
Albrecht Schäfer shows works in which light plays a central role as shadow, dusk or darkness as well as the modification and complexity, which an image or object gains in correspondence with a given situation of lighting. This is the subject matter of a series of photographs, as well as of his video installation “The Sunset“, consisting of a single-shot video, an hour in length, and of a black-and-white photograph. The film documents the view from Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, starting at daylight and ending in the dark. Seen by daylight, the well-known sparkling night-scape of Los Angeles, reveals itself as a rather dull and grey expanse. Only at nightfall it turns into the famous „L.A. Grid”. The photograph shows the facades of buildings at the Sunset Boulevard covered with layers of advertisement posters. In another installation, light becomes the object of display. It consists of a number of empty showcases, on top of which a range of objects is lying, as if put there by coincidence and lit by a spotlight. Thus they create abstract silhouettes inside the cabinets, being exhibited as if real objects. In the work “The Sun, 4. 8. 2007”, being part of the series “Newspaintings“, the notion of light appears in the title of the material used. An entire edition of the tabloid “The Sun” has been applied page by page upon canvases of the size of a newspaper page. Thus, the carrier of information is transformed into an abstract image. The texture, scales of grey and the size of the multi-part monochrome picture is determined by the material used. The series “Blank Copies” follows a principle, which is even more simple. They consist of enlarged photocopies, taken with the copier’s lid open, thus “depicting” the surrounding space. The traces on the otherwise black images, result from random scratches or stains on the surface of the machine.
Albrecht Schäfer’s artistic use of objects could be described with the words by the chemist Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier: „Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.“
Parallel to the gallery’s exhibition, Albrecht Schäfer is showing a solo presentation at the NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein until November 11, 2007. From November 10, further works are to be seen as part of the exhibition “The word in art” at the Mart - Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto.
