Cobra Museum
27.03 - 24.05 2010. Johannes Schwartz (b. Munich, 1970) presents Passion, his new series of 17 large-format photographs.Johannes Schwartz has created a new series of film-like moments, photographs of a sparse interior that has stayed still since the 1950s. Furniture and objects reflect the personality of someone who lived here for several decades. Plastic bags dispersed throughout the house have been documented in intimate fashion. Taking these bags as a subject has created a line of tension between décor and place and a documentary-like setting.
Schwartz plays with the conventions of appearance and disappearance, and their narrative dimensions, with photography as a means of expressing different imaginable realities. Our curiosity is immediately awakened by the unseen contents of the bags. At the same time, the carefully chosen fall of light evokes an atmosphere reminiscent of paintings by Johannes Vermeer: old, bygone times in contrast with the ‘chemical’ colours of the plastic. Although Schwartz’s interior photographs are pure registrations of a found situation, they seem like the results of a meticulously staged scene.
Schwartz’s artistic career took off in 1998 with interior and exterior photographs of children’s huts, followed by photographs of interiors for the blind, psychiatric treatment rooms and hunting lodges.
In 2007, Johannes Schwartz presented his Paintbox series, which won the Cobra Art Prize Amstelveen.
There will be a publication available.