KARL MARTIN HOLZÄUSER

Karl Martin Holzhäuser, b. 1944 in Germany, is one of the earliest champions of Concrete Photography. Holzhäuser along the course of his career has creating a new genre in the field of cameraless photography that combines the stringency of premeditated instructions with elements of calculated chance.

Holzhäuser photographs are the result of “aesthetic considerations and calculation that precedes the physical process that found the essence of his works: the plan, the structure, the concept, the quasi-musical score underlying the visible object”. Holzhäuser works completely in the dark, following a predevised “score” of the movement of light from memory, and allowing for extemporaneous adjustments by hand trough specific tools and apparatus that he has created on purpose in order to “convert even the most complex creative program into luminous impulses whose the end result is a photograph”.

Investigations into the interplay between tools and technique, chance and control, ground him in the strong tradition of experimentation within the history of German photography, exemplified first by the Bauhaus in the 1920s and also by Max Bense through his theory of Generative Aesthetics where aesthetics can be the result of a system of mathematical rules.

The work of Karl Martin Holzhäuser can be found in the collections of the Museum für Kunst und Geschichte, Freiburg; The Artothek Kunstverein, Bielefeld; the photographic collections of the cities of Leinfelden and Detmold; Marburger Kunstverein, Marburg; the Peter C. Ruppert Collection at The Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg; and the Schupmann Collection, among others.

The artist currently lives and works in the city of Bielefeld, Germany.

Luminous Impulse

April 29 – June 10, 2023

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