Das Ergreifen / Grasping

Grasping is a series of six concrete columns, each topped with a monitor showing a sequence of images: screenshots of a hand grasping a handful of salt. Cologne artist Johannes Jäger has been working with concrete objects for many years: concrete as a universal building material, a material for petrification and urbanization, as massive, indestructible and simultaneously variable, as liquid stone, and a universally malleable form, but also as one of the great metaphors and myths of our epoch.
At the same time, Jäger is also a self-confessed media junkie. Film, television, video, computer, photography – the omnipresent world of media, images, and sounds fascinates him and repulses him equally. From the dialogue, the juxtapositioning of the massive material and the fleeting image, Jäger’s works acquire their own identity. In Grasping, the concrete takes on an incredible lightness, while the flashing images of the media world are frozen, petrified, singled out, and similarly changed into another physical state.

Original German text: Dirk Raulf (Kurator)

Additional information: www.lippstadt.de/kultur/kultur/Lichtpromenade.php