Here: Still Life → With a background in fine arts and scenography, Mathias Renner investigates object photography with a deepened and humorous attention to semiotics. His images, often analogue photographs, feel more like choreographies, where the object is staged as a character. What looks at first like a stone-cold still life opens up at second glance into a landscape shaped by filmic and photographic references, drawing the viewer into a space where irony and fascination coexist.
Mathias Renner
Photography
There: Commodity fetishism → After having done solo and group shows and having worked on scenography projects in fashion and in collaboration with other artists, for example on the movie and exhibition Blut im Birnenbiss gerinnend at Hannover’s Kestnergesellschaft, Renner refined his approach to the representation of objects, working on the tension between their aura and simultaneous immediate obsolescence in commercial photography.
Everywhere: Agency of things → While integrating the context and its architecture into his exhibitions, as in his solo show Comfortable Gestures at Coalmine, Winterthur, Renner is “interested in questions about the agency of things, commodity fetishism and transcendent aspects in the field of commercial photography”. He further develops his practice in the context of magazines and currently works on a 16mm film project.
Mathias Renner → (*1981), Based in Zurich and Paris, currently resident at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris, www.mathiasrenner.ch
Education → Diploma in Fine Arts, HGKZ, Zurich
Project(s) → Still Life Photography