Light, Structure, Line, Shadow = Photography

Detlef Orlopp (*1937) began his apprenticeship as a photographer in 1955, and today, some seventy years later, he can look back on an impressive oeuvre. Until 1973, Detlef Orlopp held a professorship at the Werkkunstschule in Krefeld. In 2015, the Folkwang Museum in Essen acquired a significant part of his estate. Fully committed to analog black-and-white photography, the artist »paints« with light, structure, line and shading in the thematic field of landscapes and portraits. He selects for example sections of the earth’s surface and conceals their representational origin, and reduces their expansiveness to the perspectival depth of the picture surface. The absence of any comparative scale leads to a pictorial reorganization that, in its degree of abstraction, results in a formal autonomy. Detlef Orlopp’s landscape excerpts are timeless and spaceless abstractions that have been transformed into structural pictorial elements. As such, the artist positions himself in twentieth-century modernism. The tachism of Wols, the »all-over« structure of Jackson Pollock’s drippings, and the gestural style of Hans Hartung, as seen at Documenta 2, for instance, were to define the linear structure of his photographic images, frequently resembling brushstrokes. The large-format booklet »Überall splittern unsere Gesichtszüge – partout nos traits éclatent«, published to accompany the exhibition, is the first to include works from his glacier series.

Ehibition:
Kunstverein Heilbronn, 24/2 – 5/5/2024