“truce” is a strange vocabulary. Because in the word the noise of gunfire and explosions resonates with rather than the silence of a peaceful Moment. Ceasefire: This is only an interruption. A date for the peace at the time, which is not in doubt, even actionable. It is a Moment of Indeterminate. Also of the Uncanny. The truce you don’t trust.

Freddy Long

editor in the features section, responsible for the “trip sheet”.

F. A. Z.

The photographer Michael Schmidt, in 1987, was titled a Berlin Band “truce”, his inventory of the dark places in a dark light. Pictures of weeds along the wall. Images of a subculture in the backyards of tenements. The Punk slogan “No Future” stand, as it were, as the Slogan above the plant. The photographs were to document a nobody living in a no man’s land. This frightened even more than the desolate situations that had captured Schmidt, the Aesthetics of his pictures. Their disturbing effect owed to any social dedicated view, but the artistic decision-making, the world with the help of the camera to exclude. It is bulky images were read, hard to. Hardly to classify it. All determined by a terrifying silence that was supported by the diffuse grey of many of his recordings. Almost immediately a myth was structured around the book. And quickly sold out, prices rose for the narrow Band rapidly astronomical. As in the previous year, a second edition was published, was the work of group for the majority of is more of a discovery as a rediscovery.

Michael Schmidt died in 2014. Like his photographs, he was often described as bulky. And although he took with his “workshop of Photography” a lot for the acceptance of the medium as an art, he remained at a distance from the operation, a loner. His exhibitions he curated as great installations. Individual images appeared only once in a while. The more surprising it is, how many copies of Thomas Zander for the exhibition “The colour grey” in his Cologne gallery. This wall-filling tableaux, taken by itself, can be described as an event. Sensation, however, the exhibition is by the combination with Works by Gerhard Richter. He also is a loner in the art, and also for many years, the color grey fond of – or have delivered?

An almost sacred mood spreads in the two exhibition halls. Not Baroque comforting. But as the uneasy atmosphere of a test. It is as if the images were to look back into the wall. Even Gerhard Richter’s huge grey mirrors that of nearly three to one and a half feet tall, reflects the space and the visitors, but soaks it up, so to speak. Everything seems to be in resolution terms, here are the unbevölkerte world of Berlin’s courtyards under fire-walls or monotonous residential blocks in the fog, the gray Monochromies in Oil. It is understandable why Gerhard Richter could inspire for the double exhibition, so much so that he supported them generously with the loan. Here are two kindred souls meet.

It is an art of brooding and Verundeutlichens. Where Schmidt works with blur, supported judge the contours of weightlessness. And where Schmidt experimented with their own recipes in the darkroom to his recordings as low-contrast subtracted, blurred judge with brush and squeegee the paint to a sheer surface. Both lead to equally intellectually cool how hauntingly sensual results.

This is not a real abstraction. This is pure denial of the image. Once only occurs when a judge, in the paintings after the presentation of family photos, spooky shows blurred to a girl in a white dress from the grey environment of a garden, such as a light phenomenon. And yet the figure seems to be at the same time, to dissolve. Schmidt protrude, such as in response to it in a recording, the tips of leaves of bushes, such as claws in a recognition blurry wall landscape, just as they wanted to scrape the last traces of the subject from the image.