MICHAEL HIRSCHBICHLER

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archival pig­ment prints, dimen­sions variable
2017

The term “dis­solve” – tak­en from the con­text of film edit­ing – describes a tran­si­tion between two shots, where the first shot dis­solves while the sec­ond one appears. The images of both shots are thus briefly super­im­posed, where­by sep­a­rate spa­tial and tem­po­ral realms as well as dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive struc­tures merge into one dur­ing the tran­si­tion. Refer­ring to this edit­ing tech­nique, the images of the series “Dis­solves (Sky Pieces)” fuse two real­i­ties, which are – between dis­solv­ing and for­ma­tion – nei­ther total­ly present nor total­ly absent. By super­im­pos­ing bucol­ic baroque ide­al land­scapes as depict­ed in the paint­ings of Claude Lor­rain and Jacob van Ruis­dael – in which the dream of a peace­ful state of the world is cap­tured on can­vas – and war-torn real land­scapes as shown in con­tem­po­rary media images, a spa­tial and tem­po­ral lim­bo is pro­voked. Of both real­i­ties, only a piece of sky is vis­i­ble in each case, in which the soft idyl­lic light is cloud­ed by bil­lows of smoke ris­ing from explosions.