The artist Jakob Mattner materializes light to visualize ancient plants in the picture. The time of the creation of the world, the so-called “deep time,” extends back to before the emergence of human existence. Fossils are evidence of other living things. Plants, including ferns, are direct descendants of the earth's creation and transform light into life through photosynthesis.
Image gallery
Blick auf den Potsdamer Platz, im Vordergrund die St.-Matthäus-Kirche
The artist Jakob Mattner materializes the light in order to show these primeval plants in the picture: exposures of a distant time, afterimages, archetypes that fix a now that remains in limbo. “And God said: Let there be light!”. The distant sound of the first word of creation reaches the now from the immemorial past like the light of the stars from times long past. The church interior becomes a resonance space.
"Alpha" is the name of Jakob Mattner's work above the altar of St. Matthew's Church, which he created especially for the church interior. Traditionally, "Alpha and Omega", beginning and end, meet at this most exposed place in the church interior, where spirit and matter condense in the Lord's Supper and the shadows of the candlelight become apparent. Mattner stages the origin of all being with a golden shimmer as the origin of light, which remained a mystery to all great physicists.
At the end - opposite the altar under the organ gallery of the church - the question of the human being in Jakob Mattner's body cloths from 1975 arises: the human body remains in a snapshot fixed with painterly means. "What we see as brightness is the basic material, the cloth," says Jakob Mattner, "What I added are the shadows."
Vernissage on September 9th, 7 p.m
Welcome: Hannes Langbein, introduction: Rudolf Zwirner
The artist is present.
Admission free
