Formen der Wirklichkeit

Forms of Reality: From Becher to Kandl The photobook is far more than a printed archive—it is an independent artistic medium. No other movement has shaped contemporary visual culture as profoundly as the legendary "Becher School." Founded by Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, a radically new perspective on the world emerged here: cool, objective, precise, and rigorously conceptual. Under the title Forms of Reality: From Becher to Kandl, this exhibition celebrates significant publications from this era and pursues a fundamental question: How much reality lies within the photographic document? The monographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Ruff form the core. Their books document urban spaces, faces, and globalized landscapes in precise series, capturing traces of reality while transforming them into visual monuments of our time through the printed page. The exhibition deliberately expands this perspective to include four pioneering boundary-crossers who mirror and challenge the discourse of the Düsseldorf School: Joachim Brohm, a pioneer of German color photography from the Essen Folkwang tradition, responds to the Bechers' austere industrial architecture with vibrant, atmospheric everyday reality. Thomas Demand, who studied sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy, pushes the principle of documentation to its conceptual limits—his books reveal not traces of the real world, but perfect fiction: photographs of life-size reconstructed paper models. Michael Schmidt, as a singular voice in Berlin photography, rejected the polished perfection of Düsseldorf, creating raw, political, and deeply emotional photobooks exploring ruptures and historical trauma. Leo Kandl extends this discourse from a distinctly Austrian tradition, dedicating his influential photobooks "