Jochen Lempert

“For more than 35 years, Jochen Lempert’s photographs have stood out as a singular oeuvre within contemporary art. The trained biologist’s gaze is marked by constant wonder. At first, and not without irony, at the history and forms (and warps) of our cultural fascination for the inexhaustible potential of plants and animals. He is increasingly interested in the phenomena of perception and how they are translated into images, in the life forms of flora and fauna and their analogies to his own creative process. For all their photographic minimalism – always captured with the simplest means of an analogue camera or light-sensitive paper – Jochen Lempert’s pictures are full of poetic power and a profound knowledge of the Natural Sources of our existence. Along with the puristic and reduced hanging of his works in exhibitions, artist’s books are one of his favourite ways of presenting his work. Following the publication of “Phenotype” in 2013 by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, “Natural Sources” is Jochen Lempert’s second major artist’s book.” Florian Ebner

Jochen Lempert’s photographs begin with an encounter: his meeting with plants and animals, real or artificial representations in urban or rural settings, museum displays, scientific books, and more. The resulting images display a certain ease, a proximity that speaks to his comfort around his subjects. Rather than applying his scientific knowledge to what he photographs, he visually invites meaning through the act of seeing. ‘Pairs’ appears with an exhibition of Lempert’s work in Frankfurt am Main, curated by Yasmil Raymond and Deborah Müller. The juxtapositions in this series might be two pictures of the same subject, a pair of animals, or visually evocative matches.

Livre d’artiste réalisé à partir d’une série de photogrammes de petites grenouilles qui se déplacent à la surface des pages du livre.
Quatre grenouilles apparaissent en négatif et déambulent parmi les pages du livre. 4 Frogs est un jeu formel, qui contraste avec le reste du travail de Jochen Lempert. Biologiste de formation, il entreprend dans son oeuvre photographique une patiente observation de la nature, tout en témoignant et mettant en perspective nos représentations du monde organique. Par une approche évoquant Jean Painlevée, il propose ici un regard à la fois nouveau et archaïque sur l’animal, dont les mouvements semblent émaner de la page. Fixés dans un déplacement chaotique, les reflets des batraciens s’organisent pourtant sous notre regard en des sortes de constellations, en une organisation presque sensible et qui indique à notre vue la frontière de notre compréhension du vivant.