Felix Schöppner: Galaxies, 2020

From Cognition

Galaxies, 2020
40 x 30cm
Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta paper
Edition of 5 + 2AP
£450

Signed artist label on the reverse

Shipping worldwide

Enquiries: tom@opendoors.gallery

Description

OD Photo Prize 2021 | Shortlisted Artist

Human perception is limited to a fraction of what is happening around us. Especially in the field of astronomy, what we can perceive without technical aids is very manageable. Starting with simple representations of the night sky with its star formations as cave drawings or the “Nebra Sky Disk”, to the invention of the telescope and other tools for recording celestial mechanics, human development has always been linked to progress in astronomy. After thousands of years of slow but steady technical development, which has clearly speed up since the beginning of industrialisation and despite the help of the computer, our knowledge of space beyond our earth is still very marginal. So we do know approximately how old our galaxy is, how it came into being and that we are only a small solar system in a very large system, like a grain of sand on the beach. But many questions, some of them elementary, are still unanswered. A large part of our knowledge is based on values from measurements, from which conclusions can be drawn in order to prove or disprove an assumption or thesis. Science is dependent on measured values because they represent clear evidence. These values are processed in the course of graphics, drawings and/or scaled models in order to make them visually perceptible and thus understandable. The photographic representation is only rarely the means of choice, as it is not possible to produce a correct and legible representation in the majority of cases. Apart from technical limitations, a major problem is the proportionally correct reproduction of size relations, which is often neglected in illustrations or models in order to maintain readability. “Cognition” was born out of an interest in exploring how to photograph something that is essentially impossible to photograph. I wanted to develop my own representations of specific topics in astronomy, with familiar objects as the content of the images, in order to make them more tangible to the viewer.” – Felix Schöppner, 2021

Felix Schöppner (b.1990) is an artist from south Hesse, Germany. In 2010 he started studying Communication Design at University of Applied Science Darmstadt with a focus on photography. He graduated in 2021 from university with a project about structures and shapes taken from photographs of german nationalparks to create sculptures and photograph them in a still life set. In his early career Felix worked with a focus on documentary and architecture, but since 2017 he works mostly in the genre of still life with a link to sculpture and installation. His work impresses with a high degree of stringency and perfection, both in terms of content and implementation. For him, photography is part of a comprehensive process in dealing with questions of human perception.

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