Detlef OrloppÜberall splittern unsere Gesichtszüge – partout nos traits éclatent

Light, structure, line, shadow = photography! Detlef Orlopp (*1937) began an apprenticeship as a photographer in 1955, and today, 70 years later, the artist can look back on a brilliant oeuvre. Until 1973 Detlef Orlopp was a professor at the Werkkunstschule in Krefeld. In 2015 the Folkwang Museum in Essen acquired a substantial part of his archive. Wholly committed to analogue black-and-white photography, the artist “paints” with light, structure, line and shading in the thematic fields of landscape and portraiture. He selects, for instance, details of the earth’s surface whose representational origin he conceals, reducing their expansiveness to the depth perspective of the picture plane. The absence of any comparison of scale gives rise to a pictorial reordering that, in its degree of abstraction, leads to a formal autonomy. Detlef Orlopp’s landscape details are timeless and placeless abstractions, converted into structural pictorial elements. The artist thus locates himself within the modernism of the twentieth century. The tachism of a Wols, the “all-over” structure of Jackson Pollock’s drippings, the gestural quality of a Hans Hartung, whose work he had seen at Documenta 2 among other places, provided the model for the linear fabric of his photographic images, which often look like brushstrokes. The large-format booklet published to accompany the exhibition, “Überall splittern unsere Gesichtszüge – partout nos traits éclatent,” shows works from his series on glaciers for the first time.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein Heilbronn, 24/2 – 5/5/2024