Manfred Paul

Human memory is — fortunately, perhaps — not a particularly precise machine. What is, or was just a moment ago, in all its vividness, with all its emotional connotations somewhere between dreadful and dreadfully beautiful, soon loses its definition. Days, months, years later, little more remains than a vague sense of what once was. Only material mementoes, such as photographs, remain sharp and seemingly imperishable — though, of course, they are only capable of preserving a brief moment. Yet even these are not foolproof; rather, they are shaped by the photographer’s worldview and subjective perspective.

Between 1984 and 1988, Manfred Paul took photographs in artists’ studios in Dresden. These images are shaped by the realities of a political system in its final stages. The photographer focused on the faces and living spaces of the bohemian community within a utopia that had long since fallen into a state of agony. Alert faces, self-assured, defiant; figures who were no longer truly within the reach of the repressive measures of a petty-bourgeois bureaucratic state known as the GDR: Via Lewandowski, Angela Hampel, Wolfram Adalbert Scheffler, Christine Schlegel and others. The exhibition features fifteen of these portraits; the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, *Dresden 1984–1988*, contains more than twice that number.

The bleak period of the late GDR is also reflected in another of Paul’s themes. As in the great works of this genre from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, his still lifes seem to raise the question of the meaning of existence. Ceramic shards repurposed as an ashtray symbolise transience for him just as much as the empty half of a grapefruit on the windowsill or the bouquet of wildflowers against the weathered wall. Eggs, fruit and fish bones are just as much memento mori as the plug dangling from a broken socket. Though carefully conceived and meticulously staged, Paul’s compositions are not merely formal aesthetic exercises, but become a mirror of connections that are half-conscious, half-intuitive. The approximately 30 still lifes on display form the centrepiece of the exhibition. The book *Nature Morte* (spector books) is available to accompany the exhibition.

Also on display are 15 urban landscapes photographed by Manfred Paul in Prenzlauer Berg in the 1980s.

"The black and white photograph in its relentless plasticity is a cruel document of successive extinction. It stands most closely in the tradition of the baroque memento mori, which reminds us of transience in the midst of the lavish abundance of life. The remembrance of the past inherent in photography is an 'exposure', a study of one's own finite fragility begun with open eyes."
- PROF. DR. EUGEN BLUME -

Eugen Blume, former director of Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart Berlin, spoke at the opening on Friday, 16 June at 8 pm.

The artist was present.

KI generiert: Das Bild zeigt einen minimalistischen, gut beleuchteten Raum in einer Kunstgalerie oder einem Museum. An den weißen Wänden hängen mehrere gerahmte Kunstwerke, und in der Mitte des Raumes steht eine einzelne, gepolsterte Bank.

Biographical details
Manfred Paul, born in 1942 in Schraplau near Halle (Saale), initially worked as a photo lab technician, stagehand, theatre photographer and freelance photographer after leaving school. He then studied cinematography at the Academy of Film and Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg and photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. From 1974 to 1994, Paul was a lecturer in photography at the FWG Berlin; from 1995 to 2007, he was a professor of photography and audiovisual media at the FHTW Berlin. He lives in Berlin.