Double exhibition in Paderborn: An inkling of heaven on earth

A glimpse of heaven on earth

BY PATRICK BAHNERS

Here's an exit: In 2005 Barbara Klemm also visited the Venice Biennale.

Photo: Barbara Klemm

October 5, 2022 · Barbara Klemm and Christoph Brech keep the angels company in a double exhibition in the Diocesan Museum.

The coincidences in the choice of motifs always provide surprises.

Not only evil angels fall.

Even the most faithful messengers of heaven can fall into the void because doubles with brand new wings take their place of honor in their niches in the church pillars or because the whole church is cleared out and demolished.

The veterans of the hosts of heaven are caught, collected and re-established in museums, which sometimes stand directly next to the churches when they are operated by the church, such as the Archbishop's Diocesan Museum on the south-west side of the cathedral in Paderborn.

When you meet the angels who have been thrown from heaven in the emptiness of a museum room, they make a human impression.

Their sweeping gestures and cheerful faces are no longer just signs that refer to the big picture in the context of cosmic praise of God,

but somehow speak for themselves.

Elegant, capricious and fragile, these individuals seem self-absorbed and looking for companionship.

Out of the way: Christoph Brech films the conversion of the Munich National Theater.

Photo: Christoph Brech

Just look at the Annunciation Angel from the southern German workshop of Franz Ignaz Günther, which is currently standing on a white pedestal in the entrance room of the Paderborn Museum.

The virgin to whom he brings the good news of her divinely effected pregnancy is absent.

The index finger of the raised, bent left arm describes a curve that points back to the pointer in a high arc.

At the same time, the wooden figure's other arm reaches backwards, and the fingers of the right hand are slightly bent, as if trying to grasp a ball, the head of a fellow creature, or an idea.

Or should we reach for the floating hand?

That's not possible, touching is forbidden in the museum.

In the exhibition "As Seen That Way" the angel was given company.

Christoph Brech and Barbara Klemm did not place a contemporary Maria alongside Rococo Gabriel.

Brech, a video artist and photographer from Munich who specializes in art-historical and ecclesiastical subjects, certainly has no fewer Madonnas in his store than a devotional shop around the corner from the Vatican.

And Barbara Klemm, the long-time editorial photographer of the FAZ, also photographed modern young women on her travels among all the other passers-by who were not waiting for an announcement and might therefore be receptive to change.

But the concept of the exhibition, the invitation to the two artists to send works to Paderborn that are good for interesting correspondence,

A priest of modernity: Barbara Klemm photographed Pierre Boulez in February 2000 in Frankfurt.

Photo: Barbara Klemm

Conductor portraits by Barbara Klemm hang on the white wall behind the angel.

Black and white, like all her photos.

Our gaze automatically fixes on the two points of light that emerge from the darkness of the concert hall like music from the silence.

And something jumps out at us, the impulse conveyed by the movement of the hands, as if we were the musicians.

We don't know what's being played, and maybe we can't even read music.

But you don't need the play that was being performed when Barbara Klemm was in the hall, how you can have forgotten the myth of the virgin birth when you admire what the angel does with his hands, in the moment of the perfect balance of freedom and concentration.

Caricature of an artist mane?

Christoph Brech fixes the hand movements of Mariss Jansons.

Photo: Christoph Brech

Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Simon Rattle, the archangel Gabriel: What is the point of this series formation when the angel is suddenly no longer alone, as in the Christmas Gospel when the annunciation to the shepherds?

In Paderborn, the two guest stars are not included in the circle of mostly nameless artisans;

it is not intended to reveal a spiritual symbolism hidden in all photographic art.

Exactly the other way around, in church art, which was only intended for use in church services, i.e. should not yet be art, visitors discover moments of art before art, a sign language that is independent of the message.

A work by Christoph Brech, consisting of a large projected video and a series of graphics, has the same theme as Barbara Klemm's series of artist portraits.

In 2009, Brech recorded the ups and downs and backs and forths of Mariss Jansons' hands while he was conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra with the rondo from Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony, and translated this spatial event into lines that form tangles.

In this way, the creative direction of music production is reversed, so to speak: the performance throws off a new score, in abstract notation.

The works of Christoph Brech and Barbara Klemm enhance the dramatic experience of space where they showcase built-in frames and play with optical illusions.

Barbara Klemm and Christoph Brech often dealt with the same objects, right down to individual works of art in Roman antiquities collections.

These coincidences in the choice of motifs repeatedly cause surprises from room to room in the exhibition;

One might almost say that the choice made through the eyes of these artists is, in a higher sense, involuntary.

This makes the contrast between their approaches all the more apparent, which cannot be fully explained by the fact that Christoph Brech's pictures are colorful and often animated.

His graphic monument to Mariss Jansons, who died in 2019, is a characteristic work because of the technical complexity of the production, which is reproduced, so to speak, when it is received: the viewer must be told that the scrawls document a Mahler symphony.

Barbara Klemm, on the other hand, remains true to the ideal of classic reportage photography, seeking the truth at the decisive moment.

The preparation that may have gone into choosing the best perspective should not be seen in her picture.

Proportion study object: Palazzo Fortuny, Venice Photo: Barbara Klemm

In 2008 she photographed a group of young visitors at the Bode Museum on Berlin's Museum Island standing around Antonio Canova's marble statue of a dancer with cymbals.

The figure stands on a high base, so that one has to look up at her with a more or less devout expression.

Nothing of the musician's grace rubs off on the viewer, which may be due to their serious will to admire.

Maybe they are students.

The woman in the foreground on the left has raised her right arm, apparently demonstrating how the dancer's movement could be imitated.

In the background, a figure moves into the picture that only exists in museums: a woman who turns her head because she is distracted by the group, so that she looks at the viewer as she passes by.

Mock architecture: Hall of Constantine in the Vatican Museums Photo: Christoph Brecht

One could go on describing this photo which, on the first floor of the Diocesan Museum, continues the round dance opened by the conductors on the ground floor, but it is already too obvious.

Although Barbara Klemm has stood in a central position in front of the statue's face, where the group of visitors may have even given her space out of respect, the photo is a snapshot: she pressed the shutter at a specific moment, and hence the facial expressions and postures remain of persons undetermined.

This photographer is not a director who has her staff at her disposal.

The counterpart to her study of art studies is a six-minute video whose title "Hopp, hopp, hopp" is typical of Christoph Brech's romantic humor.

The viewer will hardly relate to the request.

He will sit pretty still while another dancer, stylized in antique style, this time made of bronze and undressed, a work by Johann Gottfried Schadow, a contemporary of Canova, turns around her own axis and peeks out of the darkness.

In the beginning she is a shadow of herself, in the end she shines in sheer splendor.

In this work, viewing art becomes an exercise in artificial intimacy, while ignoring the social context.

It is not rooms that follow one another, but levels, which gives an idea of ​​heaven on earth.

In other words: Gottfried Böhm, master builder from Cologne, merged the main hall of the museum with the stairwell – the result is as spacious as it is winding.

Brech loves the apparatus, his work has a baroque touch.

At the time of the prince-bishops of Paderborn, he might have constructed linkages for angel wings.

The processual nature of video art has precursors in the figures of saints that were carried forward in processions.

So where Brech is almost at home in the diocesan museum, it is also logical that some of Barbara Klemm's prints were not just hung up framed, but mounted in display cases together with their frames.

In an environment that flaunts semi-precious stones, gold sheet or at least gold paint, it is the laconic gray on gray that looks precious.

In this way, the form of presentation also offers material for comparative viewing.

To create perspectives so that a new Marian apparition becomes visible behind each halved Annunciation group: That was the vision of the architect of the Diocesan Museum, the Cologne master builder Gottfried Böhm.

The construction was completed in 1975, two years before the Center Pompidou in Paris, whose floors are also designed as open spaces.

It is not rooms that follow one another, but levels, which gives an idea of ​​heaven on earth.

In other words: Böhm has merged the main hall of the museum with the stairwell - the result is as spacious as it is winding.

The works of Christoph Brech and Barbara Klemm enhance the dramatic spatial experience, where they display built-in frames as works of art upon works of art and play with optical illusions.

What was not there for an echo: Annunciation angel from the workshop of Franz Ignaz Günther.

Photo: Paderborn Diocesan Museum/Ansgar Hoffmann

Sacred things want to be visibly hidden: the back of the Imad Madonna.

Photo: Paderborn Diocesan Museum/Ansgar Hoffmann

The Diocesan Museum employs guards to ensure the protection of things that were themselves treated as protectors of the people while they adorned the churches;

the faithful rewarded their guardian angels with candles and other offerings.

With the foreign bodies that video essays or landscape photographs depict here, the exhibition lures the local miraculous images out of the reserve of inactivity caused by enlightenment.

The works of Christoph Brech and Barbara Klemm stand up for the impious visitors, so to speak, and restore the reciprocity of salvific economic interaction.

The throne of the Madonna made of linden wood, which Bishop Imad donated to the cathedral in the eleventh century, is oriented in such a way that the wide-open eyes of the Blessed Mother rest on a special performance of the Bavarian State Opera.

Christoph Brech filmed the stagehands clearing the stage of the Munich National Theater for a concert by baritone Christian Gerhaher.

The singer's voice can already be heard with the song "Abschied" by Franz Schubert to a text by Johann Mayrhofer.

On a pillar to the left of the large video screen hangs a photograph taken by Barbara Klemm of an installation by Mirosław Balka at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

The last dancer from the ensemble of this double work show disappears in a tunnel made of massive concrete slabs.

In the light at the end of the tunnel, her back figure is just a black spot.

But she raised her right arm as if she had something to say.

"As seen - Barbara Klemm · Christoph Brech".

Diözesanmuseum Paderborn, until October 9, 2022.

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