Nusser & Baumgart, Munich

	Exhibition: Until October 20, 2012 www.nusserbaumgart.com Peter Schlör - Black & Wide Peter Schlör's new works reveal a pictorial approach. The artist uses natural phenomena - the ocean, the clouds, and forests - in order to attain a picturesque surface in his images. The various structures and characteristics accumulate to form scenes with an almost abstract flair to them. In these works Schlör liberates himself from the documentary element of photography and turns his attention towards questions of content and aesthetics. The removal of colour abstracts the motif from its reality and accentuates the significance of the language of forms. The images are thus no longer copies of nature, but rather compositions of various effects of surfaces. Schlör's crystal clear photographs of airy veils of clouds are reminiscent of works by the British impressionist William Turner. The monumental cloud formations can have just as diffuse and vague an effect as Turner's storm-tossed sea. The paradoxical thing is that Schlör has created his diffuse effect with high-definition photography. Schlör shows nature as a mysterious and powerful essence; man, however, does not appear here. He transports the romanticism of nature back into the modernised world and thus renders timelessness visible that can only be discovered by consciously pausing to take it in. Accompanying the exhibition, the recently published book Black & Wide will also be presented (published by the Kehrer Verlag and edited by the Städtische Galerie Neunkirchen on the occasion of the interdisciplinary Mono-Art Project, with exhibitions in Lothringen, Luxemburg and in Saarland). Daniel Man - Wie wahr ich? This antithetic approach is a characteristic aspect of Daniel Man's oeuvre. Again and again the artist searches for interstices and interfaces. The tension between unambiguousness and vagueness is, for Daniel Man, a driving force. Although he often uses the symbols of popular belief, customs, and traditions in his works, their original models appear again and again fractured and alienated. Daniel Man is interested not only in the mysticism arising from these symbolic images, but also in their ambiguity in various cultural systems. Just as a number can be used for anonymous communication, the artist takes these symbols out of their context and develops their universal interpretive claim. The large mirror work deals with the possibilities of dimensionality and with Man's past as a graffiti artist; but, at the same time, the working method here is also accentuated. The forms and patterns do not follow any preconceived model. The work was created over a long period of time, and the sense of its completion arose out of an unconscious feeling rather than from a definitive conviction. Like the intention underlying the écriture automatique introduced by the surrealists, a high level of authenticity and immediacy is evident in this work. The artist uses the sgraffito technique upon a mirror (sgraffito was a historically well-established technique used to adorn walls by ‘scratching away' the surface; from this technique the term graffiti was derived); the result here is an effect that plays with both light and reflection. It is characteristic for Daniel Man that he is also interested in the reverse side of the work; here, due to the matt layer applied, the effect of the surface is entirely different. The back of the work obviously carries the traces of the artist's hand-the brittle, uneven surface contains complex, unsystematic structures. The black mountain-climbing rope with hangman's knots in it, to which the mirror is attached, shows once again that, in his works, Daniel Man is interested in contradictions. Nusser & Baumgart, Munich www.nusserbaumgart.com info@nusserbaumgart.com Image: Peter Schlör, Reventón, 2011, FineArt Pigment print/ Diasec.