Ulrich Gebert

In his conceptual photographs and installation works, Ulrich Gebert addresses the culturally shaped relationship of man to nature and his environment. The installations, as well as the photographs arranged in series and wall tableaus, are not in the tradition of the romantic motif of a reunion of man and nature – rather, they testify to a critical and humorous examination. Thus, his works revolve around concepts such as order, categorisation, hierarchy, functionalisation, and instrumentalisation, exposing the gestures of violent appropriation and control inherent in the techniques of order and cultivation.

Gebert implements his works in a confluence of found material and his own pictorial inventions – that the play with the aesthetics of different materials and display forms is an important element of his artistic practice.

In his most recent group of works Eigenface, Ulrich Gebert explores a fairly new visual phenomenon that can certainly be viewed critically: what used to be reserved for the privilege of intelligence service practice is increasingly determining our private as well as public, digital as well as analog space due to the ubiquitous spread of digital devices – facial recognition. The significance of the photographically fixed face is no longer aimed at a representative, formally closed portrait practice: it is only in their linkage with other images and information that they acquire their cognitive value. As operative images (Farocki), they are only optionally addressed to human subjects.