Manfred Paul – Bilder sind aufgehobene Zeit
October 02, 2020 – November 01, 2020
Opening: Friday, October 02, 2020, 7–9 pm
The exhibition can still be visited by appointment until November 21, 2020.
Photographs, according to Manfred Paul, who can look back over a wide-ranging oeuvre created over the past fifty years, ‘are frozen time’.
The exhibition presents his intimate portraits, some of them mask-like, from the series Jutta Deutschland (1981–1984) and Steffi Scherzer (1997–2001). The images offer a look behind the scenes in Berlin’s opera houses during the 1980s and 1990s, and tell vivid stories of exceptional physical performance, exhaustion, and pride.
These self-contained, other-worldly portraits of two prima ballerinas, flanked by wilting flowers from the still — Leben (1993–2008) series, illustrate Paul’s concept of photography’s dialectical nature. The fleeting moment, once its transience is revoked by means of a balanced interplay of artistically motivated authorship and a simultaneous mastery of the photographic medium, becomes frozen in time.