A bright chirping sound reverberates through the exhibition space. Dark, shiny feathers contrast with the white walls. The floor is strewn with countless small, vibrant yellow flowers. A lime tree sprouts its soft leaves. Rays of sunlight pierce through the foliage and settle as glittering particles on the surface of the water.
Jochen Lempert’s observations materialise as fragments that combine to paint a vivid overall picture. His motifs are plants and animals, but also geological formations, seen from up close or from a great distance. The beginning of the exhibition coincides with the return of the swifts from their winter quarters. After a nine-month journey, they are back in Berlin. Parallel to their return, the harbingers of spring are beginning to manifest themselves. In biology, phenology describes the typical developmental stages of plants and the behaviour of animals in nature. There are countless such periodically recurring phenomena that are interrelated. Lempert’s work makes this synchronicity tangible. By drawing on his knowledge of biological processes, their beginnings and key stages, and by making them visible, he enables viewers to partake in different moments of this development.
Despite the obvious knowledge advantage, Lempert’s work is not underpinned by a didactic or educational motivation. Rather, it performs a non-invasive dissection of the space and time of flora and fauna. Yet this “dissection” never applies to the creatures as such, 1 as his observational stance is invariably marked by a respectful, sensitive distance to its subject. At times, he holds back so much that he does not even rely on his camera, as in his high-contrast photograms. The resulting graphic motifs almost become self-portraits of plants and their combined arrangements of stems, leaves and flowers. While Lempert often shows himself as an observant photographic subject, his analytical gaze becomes apparent in his precise mastery of photographic parameters—in the composition and the image planes, in the framing, proportions and dimensions of the print. The smallest of details can thus provide information about the surroundings, such as the reflection of a tree in the eye of a hawk. The prints, which are usually hung directly on the wall, are always connected to one another through a web of associative relationships. Careful placement and sizing create corresponding pairings, resulting in a dialogical examination of form in nature: honeycombs, with their archi-tectural geometry, sit next to a sculpture with an organically curved surface; the delicate, contrasting lines on the shell of a crab correlate with a view of a structure that turns out to be the surface of a pond or lake.
While Lempert encounters most of his subjects in his immediate surroundings, others are recorded during his travels. The collection of different regions and countries as well as seasons creates a temporally and geographically overlapping network of correspondences, which make no claim to be scientific assertions. Certainly reinforced by the unifying effect of black-and-white photography, Lempert’s nature studies depict a kind of universal, reciprocal connection. The hanging of the unframed photo-graphs further emphasises the fleeting nature of the moment as a snapshot presented in the context of an exhibition.
In the final display, there are also deliberate gaps in the spaces between “constellations”—like rays of sunlight making their way between treetops and manifesting themselves as a fine, light grey grainy texture in the image.
—Katrin Krumm
at BQ, Berlin
until June 29, 2024