Stefanie Endlich, Angelika Kettelhack, Walter Vitt
Laudation — 2007 Critics Award for Visual Arts

The works of Markus Döhne are multi levelled and transgressing borders. Photography is at the same time starting material as well as topic of Döhne’s work. More precisely, it is photographs and documents conveyed by the media from various eras, which he discovered while researching, or, which are known as the iconographic symbols of contemporary history and thus immediately available to the viewer’s memory. He mainly used material from the history of the European left as well as images of contemporary war and globalization processes and cultural-historical motifs from past and present. Photographs always seem to embody an immediate proximity and a documentary evidence. But how do they actually behave in reality? What do they tell, what are they hiding? How are they perceived, interpreted or reinterpreted? How are they transformed into memory? And how is memory stored, preserved, modified or reconstructed?

Markus Döhne, born in 1961 in Limburg, lives in Cologne, where he studied Fine Arts until 1991. With the transformation processes expressed in his series of works he combines different graphic, photoartistic, painting and sculptural techniques with conceptual thinking at a high theoretical level. He transforms the documentary templates into three-dimensional works of art that seem strange and confusing. They call forth a number of associations thereby developing and producing an aesthetic life of its own. Thus, in a both encrypted and suggestive manner, a connecting line is created between the historic occasion and today's world of experience of the viewer who discovers that the utopias and feelings of that time did not disappear, but are significantly changed and need to be grasped anew. By way of a deliberate distance, a new form of approach is enabled.

The question on the nature and functioning of the collective visual memory is more relevant today than ever before. They are discussed in philosophy and literature, history, culture and media studies. Markus Döhne has explored it through artistic means and made it the leitmotif of his work. With him, an artist is honored, who — what is rarely achieved — connects visual arts and politics to the critical reflection of his own medium in a convincing way, and thereby, developing his own unique aesthetic language.
Translated by Gisela Pauli Caldas