Ingo Mittelstaedt
Thursday, 27 March 2014
Work from DORT at Kunsthalle Rostock.
“The exhibition deals with a double interplay: on the one hand, Mittelstaedt shows his own works from previous years – interrelating these to each other. On the other hand, he curated works from the collection of the Kunsthalle creating a conduit between him and artists like Kate Diehn-Bitt, Hermann Glöckner and Willy Wolff. These artists are one of the very few that were incorporated in the collection not because of cultural policy factors but for their mere artistic nature and hence can be seen as the outcasts of the East German cultural sector. At the same time, Mittelstaedt deals intensively with the history of the Kunsthalle Rostock. In doing so he involves the exhibits of the collection as well as exhibition views from the early years of the Kusthalle to make the forms of presentation of the sixties and seventies aesthetically comprehensible.
Likewise, his own always analog works are characterized by artistic dialectics: in an exciting interaction between art historical references and photographic alienation, aesthetic dissolving and material presence, they explore the level of abstraction photography is able to offer. Objects of everyday life, objects of nature, or objects of art often constitute the basis of Mittelstaedt’s artistic works. He smoothly moves between documentation and staged displacements, not without letting both ideas mingle with each other, or making them crash into each other.” – Kunsthalle Rostock