Hartmut Neumann’s abstract, sculptural, utopian, and staged view of nature offers an inherent frame of reference for the works of Alfred Ehrhardt, which the artist used as a basis when conceiving this exhibition specifically for the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation. Neumann thus makes a new contribution the dialogical approach underlying the foundation’s exhibitions, in which the historical photographs and films of Alfred Ehrhardt are shown together with works by contemporary photographers addressing the concepts of nature and the natural.
Hartmut Neumann creates assemblage-like compositions of taxidermized animals, plant elements, natural materials, and man-made objects—visual worlds of alarming artificiality. He constructs an image of nature that appears puzzlingly alien, although it is compiled of recognizably natural forms. He creates absurd visual environments vacillating between
abstraction and representation. Stuffed finches and titmice hide in ice grottos made of sprayed mounds of building foam; parakeets breed in front of a wall created out of plastic plants and animal fur. Styrofoam balls and plastic rings mutate into a stellar constellation within a deep black cosmos. A focus of the exhibition is works dealing with the theme of the cosmos. Both in his paintings as well as his photographs, the artist constructs extraterrestrial worlds of forms and objects, whose cosmological sensibility emerges from the relationship between the gathered objects. Once Neumann has photographed his arrangements, these compositions are then destroyed and are thus only preserved via the medium of photography.
