Model car / Hummer by Doris Frohnapfel

Doris Frohnapfel

Doris Frohnapfel (* 1959, Düsseldorf) studied fine art at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and architecture at the RWTH Aachen. In 1983 she received the DAAD scholarship for Italy. During and after her architecture studies she worked at various Cologne architecture and urban planning offices. Space, architecture and urban planning form an important part of her research and content. In 1994 she received the Chargesheimer scholarship for photography/film/video from the city of Cologne, and from 1998 to 2005 she was professor of photography at the art academy in Bergen, Norway. Various stays abroad and residency scholarships, such as the Barkenhoff scholarship (Worpswede, 1990), Schloss Plüschow (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 1996), Kunst und Dokument (Beirut, 2014) and the Galata scholarship (Istanbul 2016) were able to advance her work in terms of content as a change of location. These are located on the border between the documentation of a real place or existing people and photographic abstraction. Whether in photographs, sculptural works or installations: Doris Frohnapfel attempts to reconstruct the past, traces the sediments of history, conducts an archaeology of society and describes a different side of things. “Travelling, searching, digging, finding, securing traces, rearranging things, presenting – Doris Frohnapfel’s artistic approach leads to a subjective view that is communicated intersubjectively to its counterpart and provides them with material to enable a construction of the contexts of the places visited. With the help of the photographs, display cases and objects, new constructions are created which, in the sense of Umberto Eco, constitute an open work of art that makes it clear that dealing with history and political action can only take place in critical dialogue with the interpretations of others. The artist’s constructions are testimonies and condensations of a subjective perception, which in turn can generate new, current perceptions.”* The documentary as an open construction – Sabine Fabo on the artist Doris Frohnapfel

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