Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij & Christopher Williams: Contemporary Photography Exhibition

This exhibition features a collaborative presentation by artists Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij and Christopher Williams, filling all spaces of the Secession. Their independent positions engage in a dialogue, highlighting similarities in approach and differences in execution, focusing on the state, presence, and impact of photographic images.

On invitation from the Secession, Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij and Christopher Williams have jointly developed an exhibition that spans all rooms of the building. Their independently developed positions enter into a dialogue, making visible the similarities in their approaches and the differences in their execution. Starting from an aesthetic oriented towards the documentary, both Williams and de Rijke / de Rooij investigate the state, presence, and effect of photographic images. Ubiquitous in contemporary visual cultures, these images have taken on a strange transparency – one perceives not the image, but what it depicts. Through both motif and the use of specific techniques and presentation forms, the three artists ensure a re-connection of photography to the photographed. De Rijke / de Rooij, with works that develop slowly and are visually opulent or confrontational with texts, provoke ways of seeing that sharpen towards changes in detail, without relying on consistent narratives. They present films such as 'Mandarin Ducks,' which explores social dynamics and idealized relationships within a bourgeois setting through demonstratively artificial acting and painterly compositions. Another work, 'The point of departure,' examines a 19th-century Caucasian carpet, moving from microscopic close-ups of fibers to broader views that reveal its ornament and concept as the material sense is lost. Their new work '_Bouquet IV_' and photographs '_Light Study IV_' and '_Light Study V_' produced for this exhibition play with the black-and-white color scheme characteristic of traditional photography. Christopher Williams' photographs paradoxically capture what was in the world and is therefore fleeting and constantly disappearing. His works, such as three views of a medium-format camera or deceptive corn cobs juxtaposed with a photographic color chart, reference advertising aesthetics from 30 or 40 years ago. Williams uses techniques that are becoming anachronistic, not nostalgically, but to grasp these processes at the moment of their disappearance. He links the materiality of his shots with the historicity of the recorded subject matter, suggesting that history is inscribed in both the objects of the material world and their representations. His titles, referencing the supposed objectivity of documentary photography, spin an expanded web of associations. For instance, the black-and-white photograph '_Model # 105M-R59C Kestone Shower Door 57, 4 x 59″/Chrome/Raindrop, SKU # 109149, # 96235. 970-084-000 (Meiko Perkins), Vancouver B.C., Wednesday, April 6_, 2005' depicts a woman in a shower, a seemingly classic advertising motif. While referencing 1960s advertising aesthetics, it subverts perfect imitation, granting the industrial product shower door the same presence as the woman's face and featuring a smiling 35-year-old model, thus highlighting moments that shift our perception of images.

Information on tickets can be found via the provided link, and general information about visiting the Secession is available, including opening hours. Visitors are directed to an external ticketing platform for purchases. The page indicates the museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 AM to 6 PM, but specific exhibition ticketing details beyond directing to the shop are not provided here beyond general museum entry context implicitly through ticketing platform usage.