World – Image – Power – Belief – Utopia – Man
Since his Yellow Project (1992) Günther has been investigating investigating the manifestation of the (Western) image in its significance for the definition and establishment of images of the world and of man, its effect on the modes of the visible and invisible, its role and weight for the development of social behavior / social relations. In this context, Günther’s work also represents an advancement in the conceptualization of indeterminacy. This is not the pure indeterminacy of an arbitrary, negative freedom without transcendence and history. It is instead precisely the indeterminacy – and thus the non-depictability – that cannot be anticipated or made relative by any commonality, neither that of a society nor that of a community. In the transition from the general to the singular, from the common to the particular, from language to speech, from potentiality to actuality, indeterminacy is applied: the indeterminacy of the human individual.
– Christian Kupke –
The Manifestation of Volumes
Around 1305, the Italian painter Giotto di Bondone created 38 murals in the Capella Scrovegni (Padua/Italy) with scenes from the lives of St. Joachim and Anna, their daughter Mary and from the life of Jesus Christ. With this work Giotto is today considered the founder of Renaissance painting and the inventor of Central perspective and Virtual space.
… Since then, the imagination has been locked in box rooms. Every contemporary witness knows that he is surrounded by images. Images are instructions for action. Their story is not yet over… (Arthur Engelbert)
Futur II (Dignity of Man)
Dignity of Man is a tribute to a young man who, at the age of 24, in 1486/87, wanted to invite scholars from European universities to discuss human freedom: Pico della Mirandola (1463 – 1494. His opening speech “Oration on the Dignity of Man” was never given by him, but today it is one of the most famous texts of the Renaissance.
Climate Studies
An “image” project
Climate Studies are photographic and tonal recordings of urban scenarios – an “image” project as an approach to a reality behind the images; at the same time, it implies a reflection on images.
GELB92
The surroundings themselves become the support media for the image….
Detlef Günther is on the hunt for yellow. The GELB 92 art event becomes a series of experiments, a year-long research project on the patterns of seeing. A color replaces a motif. It is not about artistic addition, but rather about finding. Yellow becomes the leitmotif for establishing a correlation between the objects of art and its use, to find ways between areas that our practiced forms of attribution always want to separate. Tipp Stadtmagazin
DeGÙ
Images are engrams of thought; they are coagulated, petrified perceptions.
A photographic sketchbook
WEB-Catalogues (pdf)
