Houses - - - - deutsch
From ”After Nature - Photographic Images between Illusion and Reality” by Ulrike Lorenz,
exhibition catalog Gerhard-von-Reutern-Haus, Willingshausen, 2003
Bergbauer positions his chosen half-timbered buildings digitally against smooth black backgrounds. Strictly separated from
their village and their social surroundings, these ”witch houses” seem now to float in a nameless space, like apparitions
from a long disappeared world. They attract us magically but at the same time evoke a slight feeling of creepiness by awakening
memories of our childhood fairy tales. In the series, these portrait-like sculpturally staged architectural forms seem like
prototypes of a crumbling and forgotten ”mythic” order that seen by day proves imaginary. And in fact, Bergbauer is
not trying to create architectural historic documentation. Rather, his alternately found and constructed ”ideal images”
try to illuminate the bizarre dialectic of demonism and ”Gemuetlichkeit”, which describes and reveals what may be an essential
aspect of ”the German” - pitch black irony close to falling into kitsch, but in the knowledge of the possibilities of the medium
that it uses.
