In view of the reception history of Bernd and Hilla Becher's artistic work, "Concrete" is an exciting new and indicatory exhibition title. Although the material of an industrial building, which the artist couple included in their photographic archive, has always been a central criterion of observation and classification for them, no building material has been elevated to the focus of one of their presentations until now.
With 39 large-format individual images and two exemplary typologies, the current exhibition focuses on the famous industrial buildings photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher, which were built primarily of concrete. In this sense, it is not only the diversity of industrial forms that comes into play, which the artist couple has preserved in their admirable body of work. Also the enormous variety and applicability of concrete emerge, its effect and expressive power having a wide range.
Photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher are presented under the common denominator of the specific building material, showing exemplary motifs from the families of objects they compiled. The images include winding towers, water towers, cooling towers, coal bunkers, grain silos, and factory buildings that were created in Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and the USA between 1966 and 2012. In this way, they also roughly trace the radius of those countries in which the artist couple's photographic work took place over five decades. Given the time of their creation, the works also extend beyond the year of Bernd Becher's death and reaffirm how actively Hilla Becher held on to the shared concept and added something new.
If we look at the photographs in the exhibition, the designation of their motifs as "Anonymous Sculptures" still proves to be convincing. Sculptors such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Brancusi, Picasso, and many others have cast sculptures in concrete right up to the present day. In Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographs, however, these are juxtaposed with sculptures of a completely different kind. It is the everyday, industrially shaped utility and functional buildings that the artist couple recognised and valued as sculptural creations already present in reality. Constructions based on a purposeful collaboration of working people, thus on the knowledge, creativity and skill of engineers, technicians, craftsmen and workers, and ultimately expressed not only in their considerable function, but equally in their significant quality of form. The brilliant artistic transfer into concisely timeless images and picture compositions has thereby parted the way to recognise these profane buildings as works of art. However, the photographic results are not only readable from the perspective of visual arts. From many different perspectives of numerous fields of knowledge, the precise and historical images of Bernd and Hilla Becher prove to be great reading and - as shown here - especially impressive when the buildings under consideration are made of concrete.
For Konrad Fischer Galerie, this exhibition connects to more than 50 years of intensive collaboration on the Bechers' work, which will be continued after the death of the artist couple with Max Becher, Bernd and Hilla Becher's son.
- Gabriele Conrath-Scholl
