Christoph Brech's central medium is film, although he started his career as a painter and has also been very involved in photography in recent years. Both painting and photography, however, remain the artistic basis of his evocative cinematographic works; one could even say that these two media culminate in his films. With the camera's viewpoint, Brech takes elements of traditional panel painting such as photography and uses them for his cinematographic strategy. What is conspicuous is the artist's mostly static use of the camera. It records a precisely defined excerpt of reality from a fixed standpoint. This technique has corresponded to the common perception of the picture-since the Renaissance- as a view through a window into an imaginary reality. Both the painted and the photographic image freeze their subject-regardless of its inner movement- in preexisting external boundaries and their static image carriers. Generally, Brech also uses this fixed framework, but his use of the (film or video) camera conveys every change that is visible in the excerpt of the image. [...]

Carla Schulz-Hoffmann
Translation: Elizabeth Gahbler


Catalogue excerpt
fast forward 2. The Power of Motion
Media Art Sammlung Goetz
Editors: Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek
Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz, 2010