Together with guest curator Asta von Mandelsloh, Grisebach is delighted to be showing the exhibition Neven Allgeier - world so crazy can't be real in our Düsseldorf representative office from 10 February.
Allgeier's first solo exhibition brings together a selection of photographs from his second publication "Fading Temples" (2022, Distanz Verlag). These are images of a present that tell of transience, of youthful subcultures, of emptiness and decay. His portraits are rich in contemporary aesthetic codes, whether in terms of photographic stylistic devices or fashion trends. As a child of the nineties, Allgeier grew up in a world in which children fed their Tamagotchis, boy bands climbed the charts and neon-coloured eye make-up was all the rage. The young people in his pictures re-appropriate these elements. However, in their serenity, the people portrayed tend to view the promises of the turn of the millennium as lost utopias.
In Allgeier's photo series, a romanticised longing for a time when "weather was not yet climate" is paired with nature and urban backdrops whose golden shimmer is scratched by decay. A globe floating above the "Excalibur City" amusement park with the slogan The world is yours loses its paint and colour. Other images show drowning daisies, melting blocks of ice on a black lava beach, trees on the Rhine infested with gypsophila. Art historian Wolfgang Ullrich states in "Fading Temples" that nature can no longer be enjoyed only aesthetically. The world is only slowly awakening from the fairytale that probably reached its peak in the nineties. In Allgeier's contemporary visual language, it collapses in a glittering dystopian fashion - the end of the world can be so terribly 'beautiful'.
Asta von Mandelsloh
Neven Allgeier (*1986) lives between Frankfurt/Main and Vienna. He recently published two photo books with Distanz Verlag. "Portraits" (2021) depicts a new generation of artists, including students from the Gursky class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The second photo book "Fading Temples" (2022) combines portraits with environments and forms the template for his solo exhibition "world so crazy can't be real". Allgeier's work appears regularly in media such as SPIKE, Art Quarterly, i-D Magazine and ZEIT Magazin and has been exhibited at the Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt and the Bonner Kunstverein, among others.