Martin Juef’s images at first glance appear somewhat unclear: meticulous drawings look like print products, handmade collages like computer generated images, and blurry photographs like paintings. This ambiguity brings up questions of how the image was made. In this way the images by Martin Juef are poetic in the literal sense, and they conceptualize the very fundamentals of their own construction (poiesis = to make).

While taking photographs, the way the images are made is for the most part given over to an apparatus that the artist calls the “Realism Machine”. He uses a so-called travel camera, which through the spontaneous choice of motifs – usually in situations with lots of movement in difficult lighting – bring it to the boundaries of its optical performance.

For the topic An Iconic City Martin Juef is exhibiting the photograph ZAR  from the series Noturnos. They are photographs that were taken during late night strolls in urban spaces.

The ZAR photograph was taken in 2018 in Belém, the state capital of Pará in the north of Brazil, where the artist lived for four years. It shows excerpts of nighttime preparations for a Carnival parade happening the next day.

Martin Juef lives and works as an artist and curator in Berlin and Leipzig.

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www.martin.juef.de

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