In the 29th year since the founding of the grant by the Peter Mertes Winery and the Bonner Kunstverein (2013), a jury comprising Regina Barunke, Fanny Gonella, Rita McBride and Christina Végh have selected the graduates of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf Anne Pöhlmann and the artist duo Henning Fehr & Philipp Rühr.

The artist duo Henning Fehr and Philipp Rühr realise films in which fiction as a construct of reality and reality in the form of documentary images are interwoven. Both artists studied photography under Christopher Williams. Over and above the medium of film/video, their exhibitions, which can also encompass books, prints or sculptural displays, make up worlds of their own that are characterised by subliminal humour, parodistic interludes and associative comparisons. The artists are presenting their most recent work in the exhibition at the Bonner Kunstverein: In “Keine Kontrolle”, the political systems of East and West found in the landscape and architecture on the Russian and American sides of the Bering Strait are entered in a dialogue with each other.

In her work as a photographer, Anne Pöhlmann is interested in the development, impact and context of photography. Her seemingly objective, reduced works pose questions concerning the medium’s functions. For the most part we now perceive photographic images as they are conveyed digitally on computer monitors or Smartphones. The placelessess of the photographic image, which can be seen in the fact that a photo can simultaneously make slightly varied impressions when mounted on different supports, forms the starting point of comprehending the exhibition space as the true site of her pictures’ layout. Pöhlmann presents a series of photographs of textiles in her exhibition which are printed on fabric. The illustrated texture is used for its qualities (colour and structure) and as an abstract means in order to create a pictorial space. The pictures are processed in such a way that their relationships to reality subtly become fictional, thus confronting us with the boundary of digital photography to reality and our way of seeing.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication (StrzeleckiBooks, Cologne).