Jochen Lempert: Natural Sources

For more than 35 years, Jochen Lempert’s photographs have stood out as a singular oeuvre within contemporary art. The trained biologist’s gaze is marked by constant wonder. At first, and not without irony, at the history and forms (and warps) of our cultural fascination for the inexhaustible potential of plants and animals.

He is increasingly interested in the phenomena of perception and how it is translated into images, to the life forms of flora and fauna and their analogies to his own creative process. For all their photographic minimalism always captured with the simplest means of an analogue camera or light-sensitive paper – Jochen Lempert's pictures are full of poetic power and a profound knowledge of the Natural Sources of our existence.

Along with the purist and reduced hanging of his works in exhibitions, artist's books are one of his favourite ways of presenting his work. Following the publication of Phenotype in 2013 by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Natural Sources is Jochen Lempert's second major artist's book.

About the Author

Claire Le Restif is an art historian and Director of the Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry, France.

Frederic Paul is a curator and writer.

Kathrin Schonegg is a photography historian and a curator at C/O Berlin.