Form & Freedom

We are very pleased to welcome a new artist to the gallery. From May 15, we will be exhibiting around 15 works by photographer Daniel Kraus, who works in Munich. Starting with single shots of urban architectures, plants and objects, he creates completely new forms and image worlds using the digital means of reflection, rotation and superimposition. What at first glance seems playful, like a digital trick to show us the world from a different perspective, is in fact a meticulous process of appropriation and metamorphosis, in which the artist reinterprets the original photograph in terms of content and turns it into a symbol for something entirely new and alien.
In New York, London, Lisbon, Venice and Munich, Daniel Kraus discovered office buildings, baroque churches, bridges – exciting urban situations for his transformations. Behind the choice of his motifs there is each time an intellectual expectation with regard to the possible result. Sometimes it is the detail of a facade, sometimes a famous monument like the Flatiron Building that captivates him. In his work ‘The Visitor’, the artist transforms this New York landmark, with its slender silhouette reaching for the sky, through a few formal interventions into a monumental spaceship that seems to move inexorably towards the viewer, as if in a science fiction film. The architectural photograph, neutral in itself, gains a surprisingly cinematic impact and dynamic, and the iconographic reading also changes fundamentally against the backdrop of new chains of association to blockbusters such as ‘Independence Day’ and ‘Interstellar’. After Daniel Krau’s transformation, the Flatiron Building no longer appears merely as an icon of modern American high-rise architecture, but as a symbol of American patriotism on the cinema screen.
Through reflections, the proportions change. Elements come into the center of the picture that originally play a secondary role, as in his work ‘Stations’, which we have chosen as the motif for the invitation card. Daniel Kraus works in series. All works are based on a selective observation of the surroundings, focused on structures. Each individual work is about the freedom to create new forms from the circumstances and to rethink iconographic content.