BORIS BECKER

ABOUT THE ARTIST

WORKS

ABOUT THE ARTIST

INTRODUCTION

On the Border of Realities Nothing is more contrary to Boris Becker than anecdotes. He removes anything from his art photography that could put him under suspicion of being a storyteller or even a romantic. When he gets into his car to find his subjects he takes an intuitive approach. He keeps his concepts in mind but tries to think less about his artistic mission and more about whether he better tank up again. Gripped by a zeal for cinema in the great era of German auteur films in the mid-1970s, the teenager Boris Becker (born 1961) explored nature with his Super-8 camera, sought out landscapes, and stalked things from every perspective. In the end he decided on – not only for economic reasons – the concentrated single photo. The reduction, the letting go and the balancing act on the border of realism was much more important to him and were much better realized with the medium of photography. After two years at Berlin’s School of Art, Becker — who remains true to the Rhineland and is today represented by the Galerie fiedler contemporary in Cologne - went to the Düsseldorf Art Academy and fell into the immediate sphere of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Their spirit swept over a whole generation of European photographers, especially Germans. Lies of Concrete Boris Becker couldn’t avoid this overwhelming influence either. In his works of the 1980s, the methods and pictorial appropriations from his teacher Bernd Becher are unmistakable. But already at this time, Becker was undermining in an almost subversive way the quasi-academic look brought up for discussion by connecting aesthetics and buildings’ purposes. One can nearly speak of an ironic commentary on Becher-like typologies, because it wasn’t the function of a building that interested the student - which was readable in its form - but the exact opposite – the architectural lie. Boris Becker purposefully chose the genre of “bunker,” with which he developed a multifaceted play of camouflage and persiflage. Camouflage, along with its resistive nature, is a basic characteristic of a bunker; the enemy should remain unaware of its true functions. With his series of above-ground bunkers, Becker applied the methods of his professor and succeeded in producing results that worked in complete opposition to one another. The indefinable replaces the unambiguous; instead of formal clarity, we’re constantly confronted with deceptions. But Becker’s bunkers are also structural tragedies, because after the war, camouflage found itself in constant continuation. Because of their massive construction, bunkers continue to be nearly indestructible, so they were only provisionally covered. Becker shows us how one tries by all available means to hide original functions and to cover up what is menacing. He shows us the fake, the clumsy, and even nearly grotesque lies of architecture. At these moments his matter-of-fact photographs reach a socio-political explosiveness, which the photographer doesn’t seek out, but which come into focus in passing, without any imposition. On the Path to Disorientation Boris Becker finally disengaged from the principles of the Becher School through his growing interest in the formal structures of nature and architecture that disregard functional organization. In terms of his photos, his teacher’s questioning the purpose of a building appears nearly old-fashioned, because architecture has long been multifunctional, standardized and determined by economics. Who today can determine with certainty whether a modern façade hides a prison, parking garage or an administration office? While he’s on the road, Boris Becker lets his pictures’ motifs surprise him. He fastidiously takes off again and again and discovers goals that have inserted themselves into his thoughts. His photos of fields develop parallel to the colorful architecture compositions. Nature, tilled and “cultivated” by people, is already plugged into the title of a series, but so is an allusion to the color fields of monochromatic painting, which was used to radicalize abstraction in the fine arts by artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein and Barnett Newman. It’s not landscapes, whose structure and dimensions are definable through spatiality and sky, but the notions of a detachment from all points of reference: “What matters to me is this balance between recognition and misconception through hiding the act of seeing,” says Becker. No house, no horizon and no idle tractor allow us to identify the wider or local circumstances with certainty. The focused view, which suggests exacting observation, leads to a disorientation that again questions the photograph’s informative value. Nature is moved into abstraction through a precise, natural cutting away. An “all over” emerges that finally loses itself in the snow pictures. In view of his fields, it’s unmistakably clear what Becker means when he says that titles containing references to places can only be deceptive. Nearly everything can look more or less the same, everywhere. Therefore Becker is only reluctantly open to larger expeditions. “It may be,” he sums up, “that some of my works look as if they come from the Antarctic, and that just proves to me how unnecessary it is to go there.” Dr. Boris von Brauchitsch