M HKA Ensembles

° 1940

Born in Berlin (), lives in .

From the 1960s Jochen Gerz, like so many other artists of his generation, has been searching for a way to integrate text and image. He was strongly influenced by visual poetry. Gerz, who is also a philologist, is interested in how different forms of communication function in different media used for art. His books, performances, installations, photographs and videos are all distinctly critical in tone. Gerz investigates the reliability of word and image and reaches the conclusion that they both fail our expectations. According to him, neither language nor image refer unambiguously to one single reality. In the 1980s he made a whole series of ‘photographic texts’, combining photographs with narrative text. Mostly they had nothing to do with each other. These works have no titles, just a number to evoke a sense of objectivity.