In spring 2023, the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum will present a solo exhibition of the artist Irmel Kamp (b. 1937), who lives in Aachen and Switzerland.
The photographer Irmel Kamp dedicates her work to European architectural modernism. In doing so, she takes a fundamentally serial approach, uses exclusively black-and-white photography, and always chooses a position that, as a public location, incorporates the surrounding space, while at the same time strikingly expressing the conciseness of the architectural form.
Irmel Kamp's research of the New Building in Tel Aviv, which she began in 1987 and carried out between 1990 and 1992 as a research project of the DFG (German Research Foundation), is comprehensive and scientifically based. In the process, she documented for the first time significant parts of the building stock that had been erected with the expansion of the Zionist city foundation in the 1930s. She researched building history, clients and architects and thus contributed significantly to today's awareness of the architecture of New Building in Tel Aviv and its significance for the constitution of a Jewish settlement area.
A group of works with residential, office and commercial buildings of the 1930s from Brussels, on the other hand, shows the very special combination of design principles and formal elements of New Building with those of Art Deco that is typical there. Irmel Kamp began her artistic career with photographs of zinc-clad facades of rural residential and commercial buildings in the East Belgian region between Aachen and Liège. Familiar with the local landscape due to the proximity of her home in Aachen, Irmel Kamp systematically recorded the diversity of this cladding of weatherboards. In doing so, as she did later in Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Italy, Irmel Kamp pursues less a typological approach and concentrates instead on the perception of the specific architectural form as it exists in the environment shaped by the conditions of its use. It thus identifies architecture as an important factor of social reality.
The exhibition is a cooperation with the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, where "Irmel Kamp. Architekturbilder" was on view from June 25 to Sept. 18, 2022.
Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
