Martin Liebscher - Berlin
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 Martin Liebscher, exhibition view, Wohnmaschine, 2007
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January 26 - March 10, 2007
We are pleased to announce the exhibition BERLIN, by Martin Liebscher. In this exhibition, the artist, born in Naumburg in 1964, presents an overview from a series of panorama photos directly linked to his chosen home, Berlin. The motifs of his Berlin portraits emerged over the course of the past six years and document not only significant sites of the city like the Protestant Cathedral, the ICC, or the Reichstag dome, but also the dynamism of a city undergoing constant change.
Martin Liebscher's panoramas are combinations of photography and film. The stretched, wave-shaped city views emerge when the artist not only moves the reconstructed small camera along with his body, but at the same time advances the film forward by hand more or less smoothly with the aperture open. In so doing, body and camera movement and the movement of the film are coordinated so that the beholder can read the resulting photographs as recognizable sequences. The camera pans achieved in this way are also subject to chance due to the multiple aspects of movement. In some works, the artist achieves wave-like blurs and vague impressions of architecture, while other photographs present more the impression of city panoramas shot from tourist viewing platforms where the horizon of classical perspective that otherwise offers orientation has been lost.
A shot from a high balcony tears the gaze over the balustrade in the foreground down into the street and collides with the façade of the Palast der Republik, ultimately again racing over the roofs in the depth of space and the open blue sky. The beholder's point of view is forced to follow an arbitrary movement and the controlled perspective of the urban planner fragments in a wandering gaze. Losing orientation and allowing oneself to drift becomes an act of visual construction, enabling things unforeseen and previously unseen.
The shots taken from the local train or a moving car are in a similar way dynamic and condensed. Interior and exterior fuse with the various layers of movement and simulate the experience of a "transparent horizon," (Paul Virilio) that is, the final horizon of visibility, which is the result of digitally generated optical (and acoustic) exaggeration of our natural environment.
In the framework of the exhibition, we present a recently published catalogue that extensively documents the artist's current works. Martin Liebscher: A Man with Opportunities. Text by Thomas Wagner. 62 pages, 68 cm x 17.2 cm. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne 2007. ISBN 13:978-3-86560-194-0