Tableau by Christian Hagemann
My photographic work "Tableau“ explores the pictorial qualities of photography. From the fund of art history, especially the still life genre and advertising photography, I take different themes, forms and meanings and play with their conventions. In a recycling process the historic motifs are emptied out of their former content and compounded with signs and designs of contemporary visual culture. My work is an examination of established iconography's and visual formulas of the history of art and translates them into the present culture.

You can see a portfolio of Christian Hagemann's work here

Rather than following the framework of a series, each picture is considered to exist self contained and to demonstrate its affiliations to an external corpus of paintings and photographs, which are relevant to its analysis. I am using photography in its ability of producing documents. All the works I produced are either constructed and staged, or are interfering with a given reality, but nevertheless seem to appear from a situation that really happened. Photography seems to be predestined to present fiction as fact, because there is no visible difference between reality and its mise en scene. Albeit things and places reveal themselves as obviously staged, photography still maintains its promise of the "it has been there“.

In this way, I am playing with what reality seems to be or could be and am dealing with aspects of the everyday. Through carefully arranged poses everyday situations appear alienated and are shifting between the "normal" and the slightly askew and exaggerated. Everyday things are suggesting meanings and signs which move between the intentional and accidental, the documentary and the fictional.

My works offer an contemplation on the photographic surface and appeal to colours, patterns and the material qualities of its subject. The banal and profane reality of the actual materials and their glorified position in my pictures irritate one another in their different readings. The notion of the trompe lóeil poses a very important point of reference to my works, as it mimics as well as parodies the sense of the real.

Christian Hagemann was born in 1976 and lives and works in the south of Berlin. He studied at Studies Communication design/Photography, Folkwang-University, Germany 1998 - 2004 and M.A. Course "Fine Art Photography", Royal College of Art, London 2005 - 2007

Selected Exhibitions;-2008"Domestic Scapes" Gallery Reckermann, Cologne, "Left to my own devices" Two Man Show, Gallery Bernhard Knaus, Frankfurt 2007 "Lost and found" Artist in Residence Show, Klaipeda ,Lithuania, "The Great Exhibition" Graduation Show, Royal College of Art, London, "After Afterlife" Group Show, Hockney Gallery, Royal College of Art, London, 2006 "Transmission" Exhibition of DAAD-Scholarship Holders of Triangle Space, Chelsea School of Art, London"Albertine goes south" Art Space Dorothee Schmid, Group Exhibition, London "Could Be About Landscape" Group Exhibition, KunstKlub Berlin, Berlin"Interzonas 06" Exhibition and conference about contemporary painting on the border to other medias of art, Palacio de Sastago, Zaragoza 2005 "Young Photography from North Rhine-Westphalia" Solo Exhibition, Goethe Institute Helsinki"Szeneries" Graduates of Bernhard Prinz, Positions of current Photography, Gallery Bernhard Knaus, Mannheim, "Warm Up" Class of Bernhard Prinz, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, 2003, Kunstverein Bremerhaven Gallery 20.21, Essen 2002" Revue" Group Exhibition in the "Gebäude C102", Cologne.

Selected Publications;-Capricious Magazine, Selection by Art and Commerce New York, 2007, Source Magazine, No 50, March/Spring 2007, Camera Austria, No 91, Autumn issue 2005

Selected Awards;-2007 Artist in Residence, Klaipeda, Lithuania, Selected for Peek 2007, Festival of emerging photographers by Art and Commerce, New York, Scholarship of Kunststiftung NRW Foundation for Art of Northrhine-Westphalia/Germany, 2005 - 2006 DAAD-Grant of the German Academic Exchange Service for Graduates, Great Britain.