 Astrid Korntheuer shows in her series Glör how well she can make use of color in a photograph. She knows how to use color in her compositions, even to the degree we see in William Eggleston’s works: If you took away the color, the composition would not survive. The series Glör was taken in the twilight of the so called ‘blue hour’ in a valley which today is fludded again. It was abandoned for some years because a dam had to be restored and nature took the opportunity to grow like in a jungle, left to it’s own resources and creating an fascinating impenetrability.
In her series ‘Loh’ the distance that speaks from Astrid Korntheuer’s very close up pictures is all the more apparent through the medium of black and white photography. Through the latter’s degree of abstraction, this distance becomes a reference to the metaphors bound up with the forest, as they were suggested in the beginning.
However, for the observer this idyll turns into gloom. In many pictures not only can we hardly make out the ground it is safe to stand on, but the twigs and branches become impervious curtains. Where we expect an idyll, there is no getting through. Indeed, the otherwise really very ‘nice’ nature, as we repeatedly believe, becomes an impassable wall which repels you all the more, the more you engage in Astrid Korntheuer’s game of light and shadow, the promising light and the depressions that her inkjet printer so impressively reproduce. She uses white, gray and black tones as well as contrast in her photographs as in an orchestral composition; to form an overall impression which aims for the universal and with which she is all the more accurate in hitting our fine sensitivity for this sphere. It equals the expulsion from Heaven.
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