Published 1 SEP 2024

Opening – 8 SEP 2024, 2-4 pm
10 SEP until 2 NOV 2024

Galerie Judin is pleased to present a very special group exhibition for this year’s Art Week, celebrating the merits of parting KW director Krist Gruijthuijsen and sweetening the departure of this brilliant curator for us left-behind Berliners.

The French author and photographer Hervé Guibert once wrote “My body, due to the effects of lust or pain, has entered a state of theatricality, of climax, that I would like to reproduce in any matter possible: by photo, by video, by audio recording. It’s a laboratory that I offer up as a performance…”. He wrote this knowing his life was coming to an end due to his HIV/AIDS condition. Guibert wrote about photography, particularly about the photographs that are not taken. He was interested in the psychology beyond the frame of an image.

Guibert pooled his according thoughts and writings in a collection of essays, titled Ghost Image. Perhaps the most affecting text relates to the day on which Guibert’s mother, usually shy in front of a camera, agreed to have her portrait taken. She was forty-five and stood, as we are told, on the threshold between beauty and old age. She allowed her hair, mostly worn up in tight curls, to be taken down, washed and combed by her son. The intimacy of this moment is palpable, and it becomes clear that on this day mother and son were actually collaborating with one another to create a special moment in their relationship. However, Guibert failed to properly load the camera and the fruits of their shared endeavor resulted in nothing more than a blank slate of film.

The exhibition Ghost Image takes the example of Guibert’s intimacy with his mother as a starting point to question the representation of the self beyond the grasp of an image, one that is fueled by the depiction of memory and loss and rendered through the lens of painting. With each of the many artists responding to this subject in his or her own way, the show presents a loose and intuitive testament to the complexities of self-presentation and, in particular, questions our understanding of memory and depiction.

The show will be accompanied by a comprehensive and complimentary brochure which will be available at the gallery during the course of the exhibition.