New Paintings II Peter Puklus

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The work of Peter Puklus gives a silent and thoroughly contemporary comment on one of the questions photography brought into discussion of visual media since its invention. Puklus' thinking and acting involves photography and video art's relation to the 'classic' arts like painting. With the miniaturisation of electronic devices the integration of digital cameras into mobile phones was archieved in 1995. Since then taking pictures became omnipresent in more situations than ever before. When using the camera phone consciously Peter Puklus has references to Dutch paintings on his mind.

He prefers classical motifs like the nude and still life and realsises them in the framework of the daily life with the closest friends, using the mobile phone as an unobtrusive imaging device. The resulting pictures of the New Paintings aeries are defined by the display of self confidence of the portrayed nude woman, subtle story-telling with the help of still life elements and the 'old-masterly' sombreness. Thanks to the low resolution and imperfections of the camera phones a vibrant grain structure in the blowups of Peter Puklus' pictures adds a reference to some of the early photographic printing techniques like the dry-plate process from the late 19th century and thus relates Puklus' work to those of Pictorialism. The photographer Peter Puklus demonstrate a very personal way to 'quote' from the history of painting as well as from analogue photography, but he uses 21st century digital technology to make contemporary statments about his perosnal envirment. Most of his pictures are accompanied by videos with the same subject set in the same interiors documenting the formation of his still pictures, thus adding another sophisticated level of refelction to his body of work and the ongoing debates about origins and references of the art of photography. Inga Schneider and Horst Kloever

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Inga Schneider