Artist: Hans-Christian Schink

Hans-Christian Schink's concepts of isolation, the outsider looking in becoming aware of their own existence through the feeling of alienation, and creating order within a vague point of view are many of the things I have made art about in the past, and want to continue. It is helpful for me to read how his art is described, and what others see in the photographs in order to better narrow my focus on broader ideas I've had about these concepts. When I first saw Schink's photos without having researched the concept, I liked that they immediately communicated that feeling of isolation and  outsider's perspective visually. I need improve on how to successfully communicate my ideas visually so my viewers can catch on to my concept in much the same way.


Biography from Rothamel Gallery:
"Since the beginning of the 1990s Hans Christian Schink has traced, in different photography series, the appearance of this desire for order. In these he reveals, on the one hand the fascination of the educated artist with architectural details as "finished" compositional models, and on the other hand they reveal a critical dimension in the proportionally tense imbalance between architecture and nature. His pictures however always retain a distance - he captures fictitiously, in a photographic act, the position of the indifferent observer who reproduces simply the apparent, what "is" (what he sees), yet on the other hand (as an inheritance from the German early romantics), an attitude signalising lost proximity, a melancholy of loss.

When Hans-Christian Schink arrives in 2002 in Los Angeles (with a scholarship from the Villa Aurora) he will be interested primarily in the periphery of the urban, which brings to light the moving interplay of different systems of order: on the one hand the objects of order and general economic set-up determined by man's will to create, and on the other hand the "rightness" of nature with its own patterns of growth and passing, sedimentation and washing away. Twenty years before, between 1978 and 1983, the American photographer Robert Adams had explored the social and ecological distortions in the surrounding areas of the Megapolis, in his Californian pictures, so that one does not certainly, from some similarity of motives, go from a secret homage to the master of the precise observation of the inconspicuous. But where Adams mixes in the invisible middle of the world, to which he loans a photographic face, Hans-Christian Schink remains in the position of the outsider, on a Baudelairian stroll, that photographs and interprets only from one's existence in the mode of distance and alienation. Therefore his landscapes have the effect of still-lives, which obviously consume, exhaust, captivate and are brought to rest."


Quotes:
"Schink is always interested in letting the physical structure of his subjects take the narrative lead, keeping the possible fictions as vague as his passersby point of view."


"In the way his work expresses a kind of random, all-encompassing visual wandering, writer Kai Uwe Schiertz has compared Schink to the Baudelairian stroller, effortlessly noting anything and everything, always outside the contemplated world. It's a kind of unprecious humanising, or miniaturising of the impossible largeness of the other, one could say."


-Lupe Nunez-Fernandez, The Saachai Gallery, http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/art_news/hans_christian_schink_at_arnes_&_roepke_madrid/3089

Interview: 
http://www.realphotographyaward.com/winner_2007_2008/finalists_interviews


Artist website: 
http://www.hc-schink.de/fotos/photographs_e.html


Ace Gallery: 
http://www.acegallery.net/artistmenu.php?Artist=11
Rothamel Gallery: 
http://www.rothamel.de/en/Hans-Christian-Schink/index.html