Jochen Lempert
23 Apr - 13 Jun 2010
Born 1958 and now living in Hamburg, since the 1990s Jochen Lempert has worked with the expertise of a trained biologist, the eye of a photographer, and the methods of a scientist. Now an exhibition space of 500 qm is to be devoted to Lempert's work of the last 15 years. His photographs are dedicated to the animal world and nature. In his early work he investigated the ways in which the animal world, caught in the cross-currents of nature and culture, is given anthropomorphic interpretations or industrial uses, and how it stealthily capture new niches in urban space.
His earliest and still unfinished group of pictures, "The Skins of Alca impennis", shows for instance the great auk. During his travels Lempert has been to see the around eighty taxidermied examples in natural history museums to complete, step by step, his portrait series on this striking bird. Lempert's "Morphological Studies", on the other hand, are concerned with similarities between the animal and human realms, using ordering systems that frequently have an associative basis. The focus of interest in his recent groups of works is directed to patterns, formations, and structures whose aleatoric power can be found in swarming birds, eddying waters and billowing clouds.
His earliest and still unfinished group of pictures, "The Skins of Alca impennis", shows for instance the great auk. During his travels Lempert has been to see the around eighty taxidermied examples in natural history museums to complete, step by step, his portrait series on this striking bird. Lempert's "Morphological Studies", on the other hand, are concerned with similarities between the animal and human realms, using ordering systems that frequently have an associative basis. The focus of interest in his recent groups of works is directed to patterns, formations, and structures whose aleatoric power can be found in swarming birds, eddying waters and billowing clouds.