Bild und Text und was dazwischen passieren kann

Tour with the curators of the exhibition Dr. Barbara Segelken and Birte Hinrichsen (Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen) and artist talk with Markus Vater

After an introductory tour of the exhibition, the curators will talk to Markus Vater. The artist, who lives in London and Düsseldorf and teaches at the HBK Essen, encounters his environment with an alert, inquiring eye. He is interested in the hidden, the overlooked in the everyday. In seemingly incidental moments, he discovers the bizarre, the abysmal and the comical. In the 63-part series Objects of Significance, Vater juxtaposes a photograph with a text written by himself. While the photographs are soberly kept in black and white and mostly show people or objects, the texts often describe personal experiences and are infused with subtle, laconic humor. Thus, image and text are always in a tense relationship with each other - a deliberate shift that shows: What we see is not necessarily what is actually meant. The texts give us an insight into the artist's way of thinking, but less so into the images combined with them. Vater's black and white drawings, which are reminiscent of cartoons in their formal language, also follow this principle. Text and image do not relate to each other illustratively - rather, the texts create new, often surprising meanings that only become apparent on closer inspection.

The event is part of the program accompanying the exhibition "Language/Text/Image". Exhibition duration: June 27 - December 7, 2025