Claudia Schubert about the photography of Frank Dömer, 2003
In 1999, Frank Dömer took the first color photographs of his „Swiss Houses“ series,
which has since grown into an extensive series, in the Swiss mountains. He encountered the homes of mountain farmers, tourist camps, stables, storage sheds and mountain pastures.
The simple and yet very individual architecture of these rather inconspicuous buildings is astonishing in its diversity and inspired the painter and photographer Frank Dömer to take stock of them over several years. Clearly depicted, the „Swiss houses“ give the impression of monumentality, but it is noticeable that this does not necessarily correspond to their actual dimensions. The landscape in which they are embedded, and which Frank Dömer captures exclusively in other photographs, recedes almost discreetly into the background without being reduced to a mere backdrop. Despite picturesque details such as plant growth on walls, traces of decay or weather conditions that adhere to some of the photographed houses, the photographs are bound to a matter-of-fact approach. The photographs correspond with the unspectacular nature of the motif, which is far away from tourist images.
Frank Dömer visits the places where the buildings are located over a longer period of time and at different times of the year. His viewpoints also change when the motif allows. For example, he photographs front, side and rear views of one and the same house in succession. In this way, he not only documents a temporal process that is sometimes only visible in small changes to the buildings (one year a yellow bucket decorates a stable, the next year it is a red bucket), he also compares the image obtained with the camera.
Dömer’s feeling for the right light, the interplay of colors and the set form reveals a painter whose interest in the medium of photography goes back to the early 1980s. In 1985, he began studying painting at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. His teachers included Thomas Bayrle, Raimer Jochims and Per Kirkeby, whose master student he became in 1991.
For several years, Frank Dömer’s exploration of painting and photography has run parallel in his work. Here, as there, the artist is concerned with the exploration of image-making and the concretization of what is often only perceived in passing.
A second thematic aspect of this work are photographs taken by Frank Dömer over the last two years in the urban context of Cologne. Here he has lived since 1995.
These urban landscapes show, among other things, streets from different viewpoints, railroad tracks, construction sites and newly built residential complexes. Cologne from a different perspective, one that captures the disorder, the overlapping layers of time, often visible in the historic house facades with such modern ingredients as advertising signs, which make the change and dynamism inherent in the urban environment clearly perceptible. (Cologne—Several Years)
In other pictures, the artist focuses on the interaction of space and architectural form in undefined urban locations. Several photographs presented here in a group show a street in the city center of Cologne. The typical buildings from the end of the 19th century can be seen, interspersed with the unadorned façades of post-war architecture, as they were still produced in the 1970s.
Frank Dömer has also photographed the immediate surroundings of the street without making this direct reference obvious. The entire area is thus defined in its heterogeneity; there is no bracket that allows a clear local assignment. Another juxtaposition shows two different views of an urban quiet zone dominated by an empty water basin that takes up a large part of the picture surface. Benches line the edge of a narrow strip of grass. The alignment in the picture, defined by the linear water basin, is interrupted by smaller buildings, which in reality also form the end of the so-called green area. The ensemble is more stony than natural, and its spatial indecision is also noticeable in the photographs.
As a distanced observer of the world of forms surrounding him, Frank Dömer seeks to discover and capture the specific characteristics of each location, as well as the everyday and the familiar. Dömer approaches all of this in a very direct way, with great formal clarity and an unerring sense of composition that stems from his long involvement with painting.
