138. RUDI MEISEL: A SPACE BETWEEN RHYTHM AND RUPTURE.
Rudi Meisel - Vor meinen Augen. Galerie Bene Taschen, Lindenstraße 19, 50674 - COLOGNE.
Rudi Meisel, Autorast, A3, Königsforst-West, südlich von Köln, BRD 1971. Silver gelatin print. Copyright Rudi Meisel, courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen.
To see an image by Rudi Meisel is to wind the eye up and in to a routine of depiction - caught out as a slice of a life lived in the unconscious.
There is an immediacy of recollection when viewing the photographers' works, an out-of-sequence portfolio of moments caught between evidence and oblivion - somehow splicing recollections of uneasy memories.
Echoes of art culture ricochet through these multi-layer portraits of lost atmospheres. Personified spaces akin to M.C.Escher's eternal diagrammatic data, as multiple staircases lead the eye back and forth, up and down, as a textile of time - warp of humanity - weft of continuum.
To Giorgio de Chirico’s deserted folly-scapes, where multiple stages and theatres play out simultaneously, as to imagine an audience positioned from every angle. A woman walks with purpose into a cityscape, flanked by oppressive, scorched cathedrals of industry, as to suggest historic events have rendered life impossible, and yet their presence leaches energy as a sense of the impending challenges the figures' determined stride. A bodily shadow cast as a sundial - a subconscious shifting in time, beating on. Meisels' melodic scenarios of daily life echo the tension of Alfred Hickcock and Edward Hopper, where questioning the rituals of human order risks the unravelling of the very fibre of life.
Meisels' sense of cinematography underscores a visual identity informed by the suspenseful strains of possibility. Inviting the viewer to align the clues within complex visual narratives. Who is the villain and who is the hero? Who are the followers and leaders? The works challenge our own positions and realisations of time and chronology, of acceptance and resistance.
Utilising the architecture of function, the stations of crossroads where we are faced with the pauses of action, where our conscious states rupture and a tethering to instinct is exposed, in an eyeline which rests on a horizon or foreground, on the hope of the next or the acceptance of the never.
Rudi Meisel, Schönhauser Allee, Dimitroffstraße (nach 1990 Danziger Straße), Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, DDR, 1984, Chromogenic print. Copyright Rudi Meisel, courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen.
Rudi Meisel - Vor meinen Augen, Galerie Bene Taschen, Lindenstraße 19, 50674 Cologne. Until 16 May 2026.
With thanks to Nadine Dinter.