Artist: Thomas Splett
Exhibition title: Heidi sieht ein Bild
Curated by: Alexander Steig
Venue: Kunstraum München, Munich, Germany
Date: March 3 – May 1, 2022
Photography: All images copyright of Thomas Splett and Kunstraum München
The Munich-based photographer and media artist Thomas Splett finds his subjects in everyday life. With a natural curiosity, he subjects the everyday to a photo-critical analysis, producing images that not only subvert the familiar, and the expectations that go along with it, but also attempt to recode it. In his exhibition project »Heidi sieht ein Bild« (Heidi sees a picture), developed especially for the Kunstraum, Splett approaches the apparent profanity of a bestseller: the classic children’s book by Johanna Spyri and the motifs of its protagonists’ outer and inner landscapes. The loose threads of fiction and their feedback into our general knowledge and realm of images permutate into a critical-atmospheric opposition.The book, as the starting point, illustrates the prototypical romantic image of Switzerland par excellence. Splett accesses these images, but also the visual worlds of the people involved, to reinvent, revise, and deconstruct established clichés within an immersive pictorial space that imbues a motif’s potential with new and different points of view
