Seeking and creating images based on photosensitive materials, graphic and performative processes, Johnny Linder explores themes of the imponderable and relative. The images pursue their own uncontrollable dynamics.
At the vernissage, art historian Alexander Leinemann (Göttingen) pleaded that photography in art should not always be given additions to give it value. "Photo art" is not necessary, he said, because after all no one talks about "painting art" either. Alexander Leinemann: "This is just photography." And photography can do more than create real images. Johnny Linder's exhibition shows what the medium is capable of. "A still image is only interesting when I have to question myself and realize that there won't be the one perfect answer," Alexander Leinemann said. Johnny Linder's photography looks forward and doesn't show something closed off, not just a visual presence. "Art works when it makes us think about much bigger things than small-format images in material form," said the art historian, who works for the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.
Transience is the theme of the installation in the front room of KWS Art Lounge NEWCOMER. "I just didn't fix things while I was developing them - and that keeps them in the process of development," Johnny Linder described. "They are images that will also gradually change in color." He exhibits processes by successively exposing the works to daylight during the exhibition period. For example, the photographic work "Repixel" remained consistently covered until the opening ceremony started, only to be exposed to the process of change by daylight at the opening. The pixelated image was recreated with individual squares of partially developed and fixed silver gelatin paper.
In the center of the front room, a Plexiglas box stands on a wooden base, containing light-sensitive papers. Visitors are asked to consciously intervene in this artistic work and in the exposure processes of the papers by removing the top sheet and exposing the next sheet to daylight.
In the back room, the artist shows several small-scale series, four drawings with Chinese ink and a video work. All of Johnny Linder's works have a delicate understated aesthetic with great painterly potential.
Johnny Linder was born in 1991 in southern Germany. The artist has been involved with photography since 2012 through a year-long stay in France, at that time he worked with analog photography. From 2013 to 2018, Johnny Linder studied art and French in Giessen for a teaching degree. In April 2019, he was already a guest at NEWCOMER in Einbeck, but then as the opening speaker for his fellow students at the joint exhibition "Rare, medium oder well done".
In 2018/2019, the artist will take over the supervision of the analog photo lab at the Institute for Art Education in Giessen and complete the Master of Arts in Art Education. In addition, Johnny Linder works freelance, takes on teaching positions in the field of art and cameraless photography and receives numerous scholarships, for example, three years ago the catalog scholarship of the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art.
Since 2021, Johnny Linder has been studying fine art and photography at the Vienna University of Applied Arts in the class of Gabriele Rothemann. There photography is freely used for artistic ideas to develop individual ways of image making and own artistic positions.
Open Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Fridays from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., the NEWCOMER KWS Art Lounge is open to the public. Current Corona rules apply.
