Opening: September 10, 2015, 7 pm

Exhibition Dates: September 11 – November 15, 2015
Location: Haus am Lützowplatz (HaL)
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Sonday, 11 AM – 6 PM
Address: Lützowplatz 9, 10785 Berlin

Andreas Koch is active in several of the fields that the Berlin art world has to offer, and many know him as author, former gallery owner or book designer. Here in his hometown of choice, Haus am Lützowplatz now has dedicated a first institutional solo exhibition to his work. Titled “Review”, a reference to the delimiting character of his artistic practice as a co-founder and editor of the influential /100 art magazine, the exhibition brings together central works from the past 20 years, and in this synoptic display of works devised together, it experiments with the format of a 45-year-old artist’s retrospective. Andreas Koch has expanded the genus of the contemporary artist to a “worker in the system of art” (Thomas Wulffen).

The starting point of his multilayered work is the relationship of perception and representation, manifesting itself in photographic and cinematic works in particular, and also including drawings and sculptures. Between theses poles, Andreas Koch operates with shifts, transitions, and disruptions of scale that penetrate the visual presence of reality in a surprising way. In this vein, the exhibition at Haus am Lützowplatz shows a photographic aerial-view reproduction of his former home including all objects within it, at a scale of 1:1 (Wohnung, 2004). Following a similar principle, Andreas Koch reproduced a used shower curtain from hundreds of individual images of both its sides, installing the result sculpturally in the same size and spatial arrangement as the original (Duschvorhang, 2005). At the interface of the second and the third dimensions, hyper-realism is a recurring feature in his works, supported by his peculiar sense of humor and precise self-reflection. Andreas Koch is “a cartographer who defaces the world that he misses.” (Carolin Meister). He often selects his private and home environment, as well as Berlin streets and squares that he has a special relationship with, such as Adalbertstraße in Kreuzberg or Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin Mitte as the motifs of his experiments in perception.

Andreas Koch’s film works, cut from photographic images, are designed mostly as loops, where a disembodied camera follows a path of inexorable magnification. In the exhibition at Haus am Lützowplatz, the most elaborate film project that the artist has yet undertaken will be presented (Lass uns Freunde bleiben, 2015). What was new for Andreas Koch was the use of communicating actors as well as the integration of a text layer, covering topics like age, post-Internet art or image production via overlapping, artificially inserted monologues.

Andreas Koch (* 1970 in Stuttgart) moved to Berlin in 1992 and studied at the HdK Berlin with Prof. Dieter Appelt and Prof. Christiane Möbus. In addition to his work as an artist and book designer, he also is an author and editor of the art magazine /100. From 1996 to 2004, he ran the Galerie Koch und Kesslau with Sybille Kesslau.

More information on the HaL Website.