Philipp GoldbachTraining Images

19.07.2024–12.01.2025 at H2 – Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst im Glaspalast

The exhibition " Training Images" by Philipp Goldbach at the H2 Center for Contemporary Art in the Glaspalast brings together more than half a million physical images. About ten years ago, the Cologne-based artist began recycling entire slide libraries with photographic reproductions of artworks from universities that had become obsolete as teaching aids due to digitization and are about to be destroyed worldwide.

Goldbach's installations with this analog film material are both snapshots and symbols of an epochal media turn in the production and use of images. They stage the art history slides between systematic arrangement in large-scale image databases and their dissolution. At the same time, Philipp Goldbach uses the old image carriers to create impressive forms for the new, seemingly disembodied universe of digital images.

A central work in the exhibition contains the decommissioned slide library of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, one of the world's most important art history institutes, which was most recently given to Goldbach.

We cordially invite you to the opening on Thursday, 18 July 2024 at 6:30 pm!