Starting point of Tobias Hübel’s works are real objects and pictures taken from the internet, consciously searched for and stumbled upon by chance. His visual research leads to a personal anthropology of suppressed and unconscious images of our cultures of mundanity, commoditiy as well as our subcultures. By translating information to form, material and picture, he produces photographs in which the process of „capturing“ receives a dual meaning: as a singling out and shaping of something already existing, and as the photographic action of picture production.
„Husk“ (2016) is the result of a transformation of an image found on the internet to the real object and back to photography. The picture of a house which was taken by an anonymous photographer after the actual house was destroyed by a natural disaster circulated the internet and was reconstructed as a material object by Hübel in order to re-photograph it. The three-dimensional object was worked on manually as well as digitally. Proportions and attributes regarding the material were deliberately conceiled, so that the physical condition of the motiv – outside of the picture – cannot be dissolved.
The physical work is referring to marble as an indestructible material with a long standing tradition in art history, which, in the era of “post-internet”, is being used as a one-dimensional surface, remaining suggestion and not going beyond an elusive simulation. Here, the surface is being formed and generated by using camera based photography as well as digital image production: the trace of the index is being interwoven with the simulation.
Tobias Hübel, *1975, lives in Bremen. Studied photography at Gesamthochschule Essen and Fachhochschule Bielefeld, diploma received in 2005 at Fachhochschule Bielefeld. Exhibitions: 2015: „Evidenz“, Galerie Barbara Oberem, „Im Inneren der Stadt“, GAK Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen; 2012: „Stay where the pepper grows“, Autocenter, Berlin; 2011: „Prohibitions in the space of art“, Leopold Museum, Wien; 2008: „Vertrautes Terrain – Gute Aussichten“ within the framework of the exhibition „Aktuelle Kunst in und über Deutschland“, ZKM, Karlsruhe; 2007: „Trust me“, f/stop, Leipzig; 2005/2006 „Gute Aussichten – Junge Deutsche Fotografie“, Museum für Fotografie, Berlin, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Dortmunder Kunstverein.