Dec 7, 2024 – Feb 23, 2025
Paul Niedermayer
it’s always off!, 2024
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it’s always off!, 2024
Glossy inkjet print
Edition of 8 + 2 AP, framed, with certificate700 €
In Paul Niedermayer’s ongoing series of photographs – mundane shots of the same part of an aging stove – a charge is generated in our heads, all the more so when one thinks of the work’s title: it’s always off. The photographs capture the slightly OCD-soaked anticipation of a potentially critical state that – with the knobs at zero and one missing – doesn’t materialize, at least not yet. For the series, Niedermayer re-staged the photographs, which she took with an iPhone presumably in a moment of great stress on her way out of the flat. The photographs thus function as reassuring proof, to be carried around in one’s jacket pocket, of having not completely lost control over one’s own life after all. Although the idea may once have been that of all artistic media, it is photography that is invested with the truth-affirming authority to assert that-(really!)- has-been, here it functions primarily to pacify the Protestant compulsion for self-control in a day-to-day existence directed by automatisms. In the edition it’s always off! (2024), created for the Kunstverein, the kitchen is filled with a sunset mood. Bathed in glowing reddish light, the stove knobs leave open the question of whether the real drama is taking place elsewhere.