Jochen Lempert

Anton Kern Gallery is excited to introduce the work of German artist Jochen Lempert. Trained as a biologist, Lempert photographs plants, animals, and the fleeting traces of natural phenomena with both scientific acumen and a poetic appreciation. His approach unites the questions of a naturalist with reflections on the medium of photography. Always black and white, the photographs depict a diverse range of subjects and genres, ranging from everyday views to abstracted details. Series alternate with single pictures, highly contrasted images with almost blank papers, through which multiple links and subtle associations are woven.

Lempert first began using his 35mm camera, typically equipped with a 50mm lens, while doing academic field work across Europe and Asia. He works exclusively with analogue techniques and prints his photographs on loose weave paper that grants the images a soft focus. Lempert’s work has a special material presence underscored by his use of enlargements (i.e. the zooming in and cropping of images, which he produces with very simple homemade developers), his conscious embrace of dust and lint and of blurred and torn edges, and the immediacy with which he presents the images, fixed unprotected on the wall. 

For Lempert, the act of taking a picture stands at the very beginning of a complex process that includes collecting and classifying hundreds of index-card size test prints, experimenting with grouping and combining images, and culminates in placing his meticulously generated prints on the walls of the exhibition space. A process that is akin to that of a poet assembling words into meaningful patterns and phrases, or a composer of musique concrète who uses recorded sounds as the primary material for new compositions. The artist’s unique narrative way of montaging kindred images on the walls clearly references methods of biology (taxonomy and morphology), but is fundamentally influenced by the techniques of experimental film, which Lempert explored during the 1980s as part of the German film collective Schmelzdahin [Melt Away]. 

Playing freely with conceptual and formal associations, analogies and symmetries, the resulting image sequences accentuate unexpected relationships between plants, animals, objects, and human beings. Lempert allows his images to speak unceremoniously about intricate topics: such as materiality or the states of matter (solid, liquid, gas) and their transformation within the photographic process into image metaphors. Discourses on physiognomic projection and perception, on materiality, and on light phenomena, are gently hinted at.