Making a picture of an apple is easy and difficult at the same time. The fact that it is round suggests that it is easy. A picture is indeed all the more a picture the more one is captured, must go in a circle, repeat in the observation without repeating oneself. As an apple, the apple is already a picture; amazingly, it is in fact often more of a picture as an apple than in the form of a picture of an apple. When I observe an apple, I inspect it. I ignore its surroundings for the most part. I have learned how to hold an apple, how to examine it for rotten spots, for worminess, freshness and beauty spots, to let it lay where it is or to take it where it is better and more beautiful. Let us assume I am holding an apple in my hand and am examining it. I always examine it, regardless of whether I want to eat it or take a photograph of it. (trans. from G.D., Nivea und Nivea, 2008)
Gerald Domenig was born 1953 in Villach, Austria and lives in Frankfurt am Main. Since the 1970s he has created a comprehensive artistic oeuvre characterised by formal rigour and thematic openness. Domenig, who always takes analogue photographs, develops the films himself and produces the enlargements, understands photography as a technique of image construction, the transfer of space into surface, the dissolution of the photographed into the image.
Solo exhibitions (selection): 2016 Sezession, Vienna; 2015 Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; 2008 Museum Ludwig, Cologne; 1988 Portikus (with Franz West), Frankfurt am Main, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; as well as numerous group exhibitions, including 2019 Straub/Huillet/Cezanne. Seelen man nicht Malt man, GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen; 2018 Kunst Haus Wien; 2008 Etablissement d’en face projects, Brussels; 1984 Von hier – Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf, Halle 13 – Messe Düsseldorf.