We are pleased to announce that we will be hosting an exhibition by Platino, showing a cross section of his photographic oeuvre since. Almost all of Platino’s photographs center around the consecutive life and work cycles Red Space 1, (Red) Space 2 and Space 3. Dubbed Externs by the artist, the resulting photographs are cibachrome prints mounted on acrylic.

Excerpt from the press release of the State Ministry for Science, Research and Arts, Baden-Württemberg, November 2016:

„The 2017 Hans-Thoma Prize honors a body of artistic work that has – since the 1970s – resituated the possibilities of painting, photography and installation within a new artistic process,“ explains State Secretary, Ministry of Science, Research and Arts, Petra Olschowski. This includes Platino’s site-specific works within and around his Spaces, as well as the so-called Externs (the translations of these spaces within the photographic medium), and exhibitions in which the Externs form the point of departure for transforming other spaces.

Olschowski: “Platino’s Spaces are at once artworks, private living spaces, studios, laboratories and galleries. They call into question the structures, ways of functioning and rule systems of art, as well as the rationales underpinning the white cube and the ‘unité d’habitation.’ Platino is constantly sounding out the new frontiers of private and public, art and life, system and chance,” says the State Secretary.

The jury has honored the three spaces designed by Platino as a unique site of aesthetic experimentation and experience. This work has not only had an impact on the regional and supraregional art scene, but also animates and sensitizes people outside of artistic circles. This is also the case with Platino’s projects in public space, such as the designs he first produced around the area of the municipal train station in the Swiss town of Horgen. “Platino’s solo shows stand out because they interrogate and change a given situation in a radical way through colorful and architectonic interventions,” the jury explained the reasons for its choice. “Developed independently of the art market, Platino’s artistic work sought out its own way of being public when he began to establish alternative production methods that connected institutional critique with artistic research, as well as aesthetic and political practice with an artistic position that has maintained its relevance and explosiveness to this day.”

Platino was born in Öhringen in 1948. He studied philosophy at the University of Tübingen and painting and sculpture at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. He lives and works in Stuttgart.