Ex negativo – Exhibition

blackprint edition

ex negativo

21.11.–31.01.2026

Each work in ex-negativo holds a relationship to something that precedes the visible image — a prior source, often fragile, sometimes gone, of which it is the translation, the transformation, or the trace. The title is not a metaphor: it describes a shared logic of making across works that share neither medium, nor period, nor author.

The Karo editions and the Balloon state this logic in its most direct form. An anonymous glass plate negative of 9 × 12 cm dating from around 1910 — a hot air balloon, photographed by an unknown operator — becomes a laminated object of 100 × 132.5 cm, 13 kg of glass and carbon pigment on Awagami Bamboo Washi, self-sufficient, without a frame. The Karo editions perform the same operation at 30 × 30 cm: stereoscopic plates, documentary views, a microscope slide of 2 mm — each enlarged, transposed onto a paper the original plate could never have received.

The Karo Museum Polycystina pushes this logic to its furthest point: approximately fifty radiolarian skeletons from Barbados, arranged around 1893 by Richard Suter on a slide measuring 2 mm, reconstructed from around one hundred exposures at successive focal planes and printed at 89.5 × 89.5 cm — an enlargement factor of approximately 450×. What was invisible to the naked eye becomes the dominant presence in the room.

The nudes from the Private Collection — Nu évanouissant and Nu de dos — come from the same decades, the same corpus of anonymous plates: photographs produced at a time when their circulation was prohibited, printed without digital retouching on artisanal Cartalafranca from Ticino, the emulsion marks and traces of time intact within the image. Daniel Rojatz works from these same Austrian plates — the same sources, the same paper — but his gesture is different: thick, direct strokes of black ink cross the photographed body without concealing it. Der Theatral is the logical continuation of Nu évanouissant — not its destruction, but its extension by other means.

wonow’s variations extend the same question from a different starting point. eux.lui.elle.nous – variations takes as its source the eight photographs of the original phygital polyptych — images destined for partial destruction by fire as part of the original work. Before that destruction, wonow reassembled and recomposed them: superimposed, displaced, reframed — the bodies still present within the accumulated layers but no longer individually legible. Each variation is printed on Kizuki washi of 24 g/m² and suspended freely within an open plywood frame — the same frame as the original work. The photographs exist here in a form the original work no longer contains.

Alexander Bühler works from assembly rather than destruction. Kegon Falls is built from a collage of negatives taken during the artist’s second trip to Japan, reconstructing the waterfall as a sequence of overlapping rectangular sections — the seams between them visible, the construction deliberate. The source is not an old plate but a series of exposures none of which contains the final image: that image exists only in their assembly.

Drachenweide & Waldrebe — Klaus-Martin Gareis

Klaus-Martin Gareis photographs weeds — plants most people pull from the ground without looking at them. Drachenweide and Waldrebe belong to his project “Das unKraut”: Swiss-native species documented in winter, in situ, at the end or the beginning of their cycle. Photographed and printed on Awagami Hakuho Editioning paper of 220 g/m², each image treats its subject with the attention usually reserved for rare things.

Photography of works © blackprint, 2025–2026