Awhile back we featured Josep Schulz’s “Sign Out” series, here is a selection of works from his “sachliches” and “formen” groups of work. In these works he photographs actual industrial architecture and edits/manipulates in order to place these buildings in a green field, to remove entrances, windows, or lettering on the factory workshops, and also traces of use and decline.
The buildings are thus deprived of their defining features. They are reduced to pure form. Here the computer becomes an artistic device for composing images. They are drawn from a real world yet they no longer seem real. Buildings become pictorial shapes, but without abandoning their origin. In this manner they allow the viewer to alternate between the spheres of reality and to imperceptibly cross the border separating them.
All over the world these buildings are mass-produced, built for all kinds of industrial production processes using identical plans and blueprints. Their exteriors offer no hint whatsoever of the specific purposes for which they are used, their façades vary only in terms of the materials selected – all of them pre-fabricated, such as slabs of concrete, corrugated sheet metal and other cheap building materials.
