Berlin

Ingmar Alge

25.3. –13.5.2006
  • <p>installation view, Kuckei + Kuckei, 2006</p>

    installation view, Kuckei + Kuckei, 2006

  • <p>installation view, Kuckei + Kuckei, 2006</p>

    installation view, Kuckei + Kuckei, 2006

  • <p>installation view, Kuckei + Kuckei, 2006</p>

    installation view, Kuckei + Kuckei, 2006

Ingmar Alge’s prefered motifs are houses and landscapes positioned somewhere between civilization and nature. They take the form of abandoned, lonely, sometimes mute arrangements, emanating hints of ambivalent moods whose impact can be melancholy and romantic, yet at the same time distanced and cool.

The realism in Ingmar Alge’s pictures is predicated on presenting reality without prejudice, but on emotions, „on what lies beyond the horizon, behind the facade“. The medium of painting, in which surfaces can be built up from countless finely varnished layers of paint on top of each other, offers him the possibility of creating such complex pictorial and emotional spaces.

By transforming photographic images, changed only slightly, of everyday, unspectacular houses and landscapes into painting, Ingmar Alge successfully shifts features of our surroundings, to which little attention is paid but that are all the more pregnant for that, into the centre of our attention and is thus able to identify characteristic behaviours in our society. The prefab behind the hedge and the car-park in the open countryside become symbols of Western man’s loneliness and longing for freedom as a consequence of increasing affluence and the individualization this brings. These pictures do not tell stories, but exaggerate slightly by subtly manipulating reality and intensifying its colours. This makes the pictures into socio-political statements, and also offers us an opportunity chance to reflect on our own desires and dreams.

Claudine Metzger, “And what are you dreaming about?” in: “Ingmar Alge – Entfernung”, Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen, Schaffhausen 2005

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