A meditation on what abstraction within the photographic medium can be today, is a constant in Bastian Gehbauer’s practice. His photographs, which he often refers to as “mental spaces”, suggest rather than disclose, imbuing seemingly ordered, vacant or static scenes with a sense of enigma and lyric sensibility. His pictures appear as spontaneous, everyday impressions, yet are meticulously thought-out mise-en-scènes of light and space, which aspire to question what’s beyond the explicitly shown. As observed in his exhibition PORTAL featuring an eponymous body of work of eleven black-and-white photographs, Bastian Gehbauer counterbalances his often-rigorous handling of composition and light with a cinematographic quality which veils the images in a mood of secrecy.

A continuation of his visual language, Gehbauer’s ‘Portal’ series (2020-2021) draws on his interrogation of abstraction and representation, principles of architecture, and notions of the sublime. Ordinary objects and places from his everyday surroundings serve as a point of departure for his reduced geometric compositions, where surface meets depth, and light meets its shadows. Detached from time and space, they form a backdrop to the unknown, at once blurring and expanding notions of representation and perspective.

As suggested by the series’ title, Bastian Gehbauer uses the metaphor of the portal as an aperture, a transition from one place or instance into another, into a three-dimensional reality beyond. His portals – a door, a window, a screen, … – function as architectural thresholds dividing spaces of inside and outside, here and there, in front of and behind, past and presence. Straddling the line between the figurative and the abstract, Gehbauer uses high resolution exposure techniques in order to render the visual reality – ordinary objects and spaces – into minimalist, nearly monochrome compositions of intersecting surfaces and lines. By delineating areas of light and darkness with high optical clarity Gehbauer enhances the three-dimensional quality of the pictorial field, expanding it into space.

The windows in ‘Scheiben’, ‘Zugang’ and ‘Schwelle’ (2020), or the doors in ‘Front’ (2020) and ‘Spalt’ (2021), can be understood as portals to the outside world that plunge our view into a vast expanse beyond. Conversely, subjects like walls or screens, as seen in ‘Standpunkt’ (2021) and ‘Monitor’ (2020), are referred to by the artist as frames that limit the view beyond. With their ambivalent meaning for being both means of passage and barriers, each photograph becomes an invitation to introspection.

The rooms in ‘Areale’ (2020), ‘Brüstung’ (2020), 'untitled (2020) and ‘Fuge’ (2021) epitomise Gehbauer’s pursuit of organising pictorial space through geometry and order in his aspiration to spawn expressions of the sublime. In these works, Gehbauer schematises space in minimal simplicity, carefully staged in two-tone compositions of high contrasting black-and-white, or in purely white planes merely distinguished by their shadows. Despite their strict formal aspect, the spaces evoke a sense of quietness, solitude or suspense: an empty classroom, the infinite void of an office space, a sterile bedroom – in-between worlds, which may act as “vehicles of one’s individual‘s psychology”.

Ultimately, we can look at Bastian Gehbauer’s photographs as near-abstractions, simultaneously concrete and illusionistic, hyperrealistic and dreamlike, matter-of-fact and enigmatic. In his personal approach towards synthesising abstraction and representation, Gehbauer extends the very act of seeing and contemplation.

Bastian Gehbauer (b. 1985) studied at at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin and the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart (ABK) with Ricarda Roggan. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig (HGB), where he studied photography in the class of Heidi Specker. His work has been shown in solo- and group exhibitions at various institutions, including Folkwang Museum, Essen, Photobastei, Zurich, SAP Kunsthalle, Walldorf and Gallery Pavlov ́s Dog. He lives and works in Berlin.