25.5.-28.6.03

Summer is approaching – as is the last exhibition in the gallery before the summer break. This exhibiton is focusing on contemporary photography. Gian Paolo Minelli, who lives in Argentina, shows his most recent works. Visiting the former state prison of Buenos Aires, he created impressive works that bespeak the will for life and freedom on the one hand and an incomparable melancholy on the other. These photographs of the closed-off system of the prison are confronted with Reto Camenisch’s landscapes. Camenisch is a master in detecting the soul of a landscape as it were and arresting it in photographs. Whether he depicts hilly Swiss Alps, rough Irish landscapes or dreamy beaches, it is always landscapes that are the centre of his attention – timeless and distant. Thus the exhibiton presents two parallel realities – reality in a space hermetically closed-off and reality outside, beyond walls. Minellis colour prints start to communicate with Camenisch’s black-and-white pictures, just as reality does with dreams.

Bernhard Bischoff, May 2003