In this exhibition commissioned by Sonia Voss in collaboration with the Goethe Institute Paris and the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation in Berlin, the artist Isabelle Le Minh re-interprets a remarkable body of work by Alfred Ehrhardt (1901-1984), a major figure of the German Bauhaus: his photographs of crystals and minerals. With the two series presented here – Kristallklar and Cristallogrammes – Le Minh addsa new instalment to her sequence of critical homages to seminal figures of photography, gathered together under the title After Photography.

Le Minh took an especial interest in Ehrhardt’s photographs of crystals and minerals from 1938-39. The relationship between volume and light as well as the effects of transparency and diffraction with which Ehrhardt is playing masterfully in these photographs produce a remarkable synthesis of his musical education, his studies at the Bauhaus, and his readings in German Naturphilosophie.

In the series Kristallklar, Le Minh juxtaposes Ehrhardt’s negatives – disclosing their original flaws as well as Ehrhardt’s retouching process – with landscapes of the crystals’ regions of origin found in the internet. She reveals the photograph as an elaborated image, the result of a series of intentional operations, and plays with the ambivalent nature of photography, which is at once documentation and subjective construction.

Cristallogrammes is a series of photograms resulting from small, abstract constructions assembled out of photo archiving materials and placed on light-sensitive paper. The products of this process bear a striking resemblance to Ehrhardt’s crystals and remind us that photographs can also lure us into illusion.

Two works complete the exhibition: Épitrope, a reinterpretation of Ehrhardt’s Epidot, and Silber, a tautological photograph that superposes the image of a native silver specimen on a background of paper coated with silver leaf.

« Cristal réel » – a scientific term designating an imperfect crystal, such as one finds occurring naturally in the earth – is both the first presentation in France of works by Alfred Ehrhardt and the first solo exhibition of Isabelle Le Minh in Germany.

Exhibition supported by the PERSPEKTIVE Fund for Contemporary Art & Architecture of the Bureau des arts plastiques de l’Institut français, sponsored by the French Ministry of Culture and the Goethe Institute

Booklet published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation: downloadable here

Goethe Institute Paris
23 May 2019 – 1 September 2019

Around the exhibition:
5 June 2019: artist talk at the Goethe Institute Paris, with Isabelle Le Minh, Florian Ebner, head of the Photography Department of Centre Pompidou, and Sonia Voss
30 August 2020: artist talk at the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation, with Isabelle Le Minh, Florian Ebner, head of the Photography Department of Centre Pompidou, and Sonia Voss

Images: Artland 3D