VARKENSMARKT 10
RUE DU MARCHÉ AUX PORCS
1000 BRUSSELS
view@dependance.be
@dependance.view
Gerald Domenig
Neuerscheinungendépendance VIEW is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Gerald Domenig.
Since the 1970s, Gerald Domenig has been quietly shaping a photographic archive. His images do not dwell on subjects in the conventional sense. Instead, they explore what the camera can do, how it can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Everyday scenes become subtle inventions, carefully composed through observation and the photographic process, each Bild a self-contained space with its own internal logic. For Domenig, photography is a way of structuring space. He reduces the three-dimensional world into compositions that reveal hidden patterns and delicate ambiguities.
Domenig’s work is driven not by motifs but by the capacity of the Bild to emerge, to command attention, and to invite perception. Foreground and background are rarely distinct; instead they merge, intersect, and sometimes resist resolution. The tension this creates is central to every composition. Domenig photographs carry ambiguity in space, a quiet unease reminiscent of a Cézanne canvas. The flatness of the photographic surface invites the eye to wander, to scan, explore, and discover.
At times, Domenig intervenes physically, cutting into the photograph to solve practical or formal problems. Cropped corners or excised details address uneven exposures or compositional imbalances, yet they do more than correct, they create new meaning. In one photograph of a parking sign features a cut-off letter “P”; by removing a corner elsewhere in the photograph, he restores balance in an unconventional, yet deeply satisfying way.
Domenig’s books extend this logic of image and perception. While sifting through his archive, he paired images with titles for potential books he had recorded over the years. These combinations are spontaneous yet generative: a title and cover can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy, inspiring the creation of the very book they suggest. In the words of Samuel Beckett, they become an act of Ingangsetzung, setting something into motion simply by naming it.
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Gerald Domenig (Austria, 1953) lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany. He studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1972 to 1973 and at Frankfurt’s Städelschule from 1974 to 1978, where in 1976 he initiated its photography program. He had solo exhibitions at Secession,Vienna; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Portikus, Frankfurt and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden. His work was included in exhibitions at Kunst Haus Wien, Vienna; Etablissement d´en face projects, Brussels and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt among others. In 2021 he won the Österreichischer Kunstpreis für Künstlerische Fotografie.