Thomas Kellner

Place: Bonn

Born: 1966

Biography:

Thomas Kellner (born May 28, 1966, in Bonn) is a German fine-art photographer, lecturer and curator. He became known above all for his large-format photographs of famous architectural monuments, which, through many individual images and a shifted camera perspective, look like 'photo mosaics'. Thomas Kellner's fine art photography changes the object of the image and questions what we see. This continuous reinvention of himself and of the formal method always leads to new options for interpretation. A selection of Thomas Kellner's work shows analog compositions from the period of 1997 to 2023. Beginning from the idea of Cubism after Delaunay, he transfers the international movement of Deconstructivism from architecture to photography today. He photographs buildings, deconstructs and fragments them and assembles them into a heterogeneous conglomerate of forms. And yet, his famous montages of architectural attractions and architectural icons in cubist contact sheets like the Grand Canyon, the Golden Gate Bridge or the Great Wall of China, are just one type of his multifaceted works. He uses to change our perspective and link art to our thinking. Prof. Irina Chmyreva from the Academy in Moscow defined his work as 'visual analytical synthesis'. His numerous pinhole camera projects, including portraits, demonstrate that an image cannot be planned. Each portrait is unique and reveals a new side of photography to its viewer. Documentary photography however, not only mirrors a changing culture and society, but also bears witness to an evolving photographic art in the medium of photography. Kellner's architectural photography opens up a view of the polarity of a building. The appraisal and condemnation of the subject's emerging changes is as dualistic as the architectural entity itself. Whether collage, typology or installation, his works play with our perception: they show us only fragments and then again, the whole. They always open up new perspectives.