MERISTEME | Bärbel Praun

MERISTEME

Bärbel Praun
Isabell Schulte
Ömer Faruk Kaplan
Yannick Riemer
Sophia Domagała

curated by Felix Becker

The office figures (2020) by Bärbel Praun are a series of 27 photographs that utilise the means of installation, collage, painting, drawing and sculpture to capture their subjects. For almost two years, the artist photographed in-situ installations in a temporary 15m² studio in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort. The merest traces on the bare walls of a former customs office were traced with pencil lines, materials that she brought with her or were found there were draped, strings were stretched or shapes were painted with emulsion paint. Using the medium of photography, Praun transforms these site-specific interventions into independent images in which the studio space recedes almost completely and fades into an expanded pictorial logic. Similar to a picture puzzle, the office figures switch back and forth between photographs of spatial situations, abstract paintings or drawings. The sculpted pieces display various characteristics, such as leaning, bending, floating, curving or stretching - like individual, specialised cellular bodies from the conceptual meristematic space of the studio.