SETAREH is pleased to announce Sebastian Riemer's solo exhibition "Das Ende des XX Jahrhunderts" at SETAREH Berlin.Sebastian Riemer’s Stills are concerned with obsolete things: 35mm slides used for teaching and research in art history during the 20th century. This series explores a medium that is in the process of disappearing. These are not snapshots taken and seen only in private. What you could call the series’ raw material comprises labeled, often mass-produced, professional images, which Riemer then photographs. This process results in semantically dazzling large-format pictures.
The images might give the impression that they have been meticulously constructed; their pictorial elements are seamlessly intertwined. The slide showing Caspar David Friedrich’s Mountain Landscape with Rainbow depicts a surreal crescent moon when rotated 90 degrees. The decomposing pigments make the landscape disappear. On its left and right edges, inscriptions suggest the wings of a triptych. Caravaggio’s Narcissus (rotated 180 degrees) already explores the theme of mirroring and doubling as it is—and so does an early Mondrian painting. Others, like René Magritte’s famous pipe painting, become the stage for Riemer’s network of meanings: this is not a pipe, and it definitely is not a slide.