Irmel Kamp: Architectural Images

Irmel Kamp: Architectural Images is a large-scale exhibition of the work of German photographer Irmel Kamp. It’s the first comprehensive tribute to her artistic oeuvre. On this occasion Leopold-Hoesch-Museum shows a representative selection of works from the four large work groups Zink (1978–82), Tel Aviv (1987–92), Bruxelles - Brussel (1996/97) and Moderne in Europa (1998–2006). The exhibition has been generated in cooperation with the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig and is accompanied by a catalogue (German/English), published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne.

Irmel Kamp [born 1937 in Düsseldorf (Germany), lives and works in Aachen (Germany) and Stäfa (Switzerland)] devotes her artistic work to phenomena of regional architecture. Based on encounters with specific manifestations, especially of European architectural patterns, she creates characteristic groups of works. In doing so, she basically proceeds serially, exclusively uses black-and-white photography and always chooses a position that, as a public location, incorporates the surrounding space, but at the same time strikingly expresses the conciseness of the architectural form.

Familiar with the region of East Belgium since her youth, she later explored the area between Aachen and Liège on numerous excursions. This is how her first large group of works, Zink (Zinc), came into being, showing facades of rural architecture clad with sheets of zinc. Known for a long time as Neutral Moresnet or Altenberg, zinc was mined here on a large scale during the 19th century and was used primarily as a uniform roofing material for Baron Haussmann’s urban planning measures in Paris and as a material for numerous everyday objects. And so zinc sheets were also used in various shingle-shaped arrangements to protect the weather sides of existing residential and commercial buildings in the rural area of East Belgium, as a modern building element at the time that had a strong formal influence on local architecture.

A stay in Tel Aviv in the early 1980s awakened Irmel Kamp’s interest in the impressive examples of Modernism that could be discovered and recognized there. Irmel Kamp’s research of modern architecture in Tel Aviv, which she started in 1987 and carried out from 1990 to 1992. For the first time, she documented significant parts of the building stock that had been erected with the expansion of the Zionist city foundation in the 1930s. In exchange with people on site, she researched the history of construction, clients and architects and thus contributed significantly to today’s awareness of the architecture of Modernism in Tel Aviv and its significance for the constitution of a Jewish settlement space. This resulted not least in the emergence of the idea of monument protection in Tel Aviv, the founding of a corresponding authority and measures for the preservation of this cultural-historical heritage.

Other central groups of works in Irmel Kamp’s oeuvre are photographs of residential, office and commercial buildings in Brussels in the 1930s, which show a very special combination of design principles and formal elements of Modernism with those of Art Deco, as well as of exemplary Modernist buildings throughout Europe. Irmel Kamp developed both groups on cursory forays through the Belgian capital and on journeys to Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic and Italy. In all of her projects, the artist follows less of a typological approach, but rather concentrates on the perception of the specific architectural form, as it exists in the environment shaped by the conditions of its use and at the same time follows a clear will to form. She recognizes these qualities through close observation, captures them in precisely selected views, and thus identifies architecture as an important factor of social reality.

Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia