Passages: Ingo Baumgarten
Gallery Chosun presents a solo exhibition by German artist Ingo Baumgarten from February 7 to February 27. Born in Germany, Baumgarten studied in Japan and lived in Taiwan and China before settling in Korea. Drawing on memories formed through these many places, he reconstructs experiences of living spaces in his paintings. At first glance, his works appear orderly and carefully composed, but beneath this surface lies deep reflection on the society in which one lives. The cityscapes he creates feel unfamiliar, yet they show scenes drawn from everyday life.
After adapting to life in Korea for nine years, the artist is no longer simply an outsider reinterpreting Korea from a European point of view. He is now a foreign yet local Seoul resident who looks at daily life from the same angle as those around him, while continuing to discover it anew. This exhibition presents his recent works. Through them, viewers are invited to notice traces of a changing city and to share memories connected to those changes.
Ingo Baumgarten paints the city we live in and the buildings within it. Buildings are places where people live and work, containers that hold everyday life. For the artist, architecture is not just physical space but a social structure shaped by culture and ideology. In this sense, the buildings he paints can be seen as surfaces that carry human desire, hope, daily reality, and fantasy.
He is especially drawn to buildings that break aesthetic balance in the pursuit of efficiency, that stand out awkwardly from their surroundings due to excessive practicality, or that create discord by adopting foreign standards of beauty. Baumgarten rearranges these mismatches on the canvas, turning the city’s strange elements, selected through his gaze, into works that are both odd and beautiful.
The city also reveals changing human desires on the outer skins of its building as time passes. Because the artist himself lives within the city, observing these desires is also a way of observing his own. In this sense, his work functions like an inner, watchful eye turned back on the self. At the end of winter and the beginning of spring, this exhibition offers a chance to rediscover the urban landscape through Baumgarten’s paintings and to look inward at one’s own place within the city and its buildings. (Gallery Chosun)
When viewing a work, each viewer focuses on different details and places emphasis in different areas. Based on their own perspective and experience, they arrive at different interpretations. This freedom of interpretation helps explain my idea of “visual anthropology”.
Visual anthropology can be described as work that begins with observation and develops through the study of everyday life, culture, and society. Since I began studying painting thirty years ago, I have wanted my work to be relational, connected to society and reality. To do this, I first observe society and daily life and then develop my work from those observations. In this process, I see myself as a representative medium that reflects society and reality(...)
I have worked with many themes and motifs shaped by my aesthetic, cultural, social, and historical interests. Recently, I have focused on architecture and the moments when buildings reveal themselves in everyday life. What interests me most is how ideology is embedded in architecture and how it changes over time(...)
The word Passages can be translated as process, path, or transition. It can be understood differently depending on context. Passages refers to an in-between role that connects or mediates space, time, and situations, and it carries the meaning of enabling movement toward change. A process suggests something in the middle or in between, often vague and ambiguous, with two sides. A transition acts as a temporal and spatial passage linking past and future, while also allowing reflection on both from the position of the present. (Ingo Baumgarten)