REINHARD GÖRNER

ABOUT THE ARTIST

WORKS

ABOUT THE ARTIST

INTRODUCTION

Secret Correspondence What Reinhard Görner (*1950) demands from his photographic works on the world of flowers, the absolute claim for beauty, is what he achieves similarly in the elegance of temples of art. “Every plant carries its own secret that it reveals anytime to anybody. But”, continues the photographer, “a plant can only reveal it, because we share it.” This engagement with the secrets of beauty is the same that rooms of art demand. Instead of the biological cycle of growth and decay, it is the infinite here, the constant that is aspired. Instead of handling living creatures, one deals with dead objects. Nonetheless, the universal rules of beauty affect a museum as well, the more so as sensitive sculptures and paintings absolutely develop a life of their own and are able to correspond with each other. Their eyes seem to meet, the eyes of men and women, nudes and dressed, old and young. In one room you find two Dutch capitulars suddenly in contact with a lasciviously lolling Sebastian two cabinets away, as if he wanted to show them the path to ecstasy and sanctity. In another hall an earthly and angelic Amor meet and have to be kept apart by a door, just as it had to be done with their painters who then carried out their envy and disapproval violently and juristic. Stories are spun that cover canvases, conquer halls and vault over eras as if of no significance. But Reinhard Görner senses the rooms themselves too. Sometimes they are empty and yet not rejecting, but inviting and full of expectation, seemingly wanting to know what will happen in them. The photographer, who first studied German language and literature, dramatics and sinology before turning towards artistic photography in 1975, is a master of quiescence. His pictures, no matter which genre, follow a simple rule: they convince with esthetsia and perfection.