Tell him it is all a transition by Joachim Froese
December 2011 to April 2012
About the artist
Joachim Froese
Born 1963 Montreal, Canada
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Brisbane, Australia
Froese works in a unique manner, by juxtaposing varying numbers of individual prints, and his images are laboriously assembled constructs that often defy reality.
Since 1999 Froese became known for his series Rhopography and Species. Inspired by art history they re-evaluate the inherent qualities of analogue black and white photography and investigate conceptual links with Baroque and Renaissance painting. Since 2006 he also works in colour and concentrates on his immediate family history, often blurring the lines between still life, documentation and portraiture.
Froese has exhibited widely in Australia and abroad and his work is represented in a number of public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Redland Art Gallery and Artbank Australia.
Froese was awarded the 2007 Australia Council Grant for a three month artist residency in Berlin. In 2011 he has held solo exhibitions in Brisbane and London and his work was shown in group exhibitions in Australia, the USA and France.
In 2009, QUT Art Museum held a much anticipated survey exhibition of Froese's work, Stilled Life: Joachim Froese Photographs 1999-2008, with a supporting publication launched through the Queensland Centre of Photography to coincide.
About the work
The title of Joachim Froese's billboard work, Tell him it is all a transition, is an English translation of the words Sage ihm, es sei alles ein Übergang - a quote taken from the first letter Froese's German grandfather wrote home to his wife and two young children after being deployed to the Eastern front during World War II. It was a war he never returned home from.
In the billboard image Froese has photographed his grandfather's war letters as origami boats, representing the fragile sense of escape that letter writing may have afforded his grandfather and countless others caught in the catastrophe of war.
His use of origami in this work alludes to another poignant war story - that of Sadako Sasaki and the 1000 cranes. There is a Japanese legend that says anyone who folds 1000 origami cranes will be granted a wish. Following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Sadako suffered from leukaemia due to radiation exposure. Her great wish was to become healthy again, and she earnestly folded many cranes but she died in 1955 aged 12.
Image: Joachim Froese Tell him it is all a transition 2011
