Born in Zimbabwe in 1972, Adrian Hermanides lives in Berlin since 2007 and has been elaborating complex narratives and precise portraits through arrangement of found objects. For this exhibition, he makes use of early century photonegative glass plates of high altitude Alpine sceneries. The outstanding quality of the negative has allowed him to print large-scale images of this black and white mineral landscape that are then presented upside down to mark new authorship and emphasize the abstract quality of the topography.
Since the late 60’s, diverse strategies of appropriation revealed the understructure of art, challenging concepts of originality and authenticity in a society, which to an increasing degree is being elaborated around simulacra, the clout of an image not necessarily referring to an experience but to the image itself. Adrian Hermanides anti-expressionist and quasi-animist perspective on objects attributes a certain spiritual essence to these anonymous photographs and the nature their represent, transcending notion of time, place and identification.
Recent discourses on copyright issue as a deontological demand with its economical retribution versus unaltered flows of knowledge place counter cultural rhetoric in a critical fore, revealing intertextuality or any plundering referential practices as an integrated mode of production.

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