Adrian Sauer: Truth Table

Digital images can display a maximum of 16,777,216 colours. This fact is not noticeable in everyday life, because in visual perception the individual colour pixels are formed into motifs, colour gradients, outlines and shapes.

In Adrian Sauer's artistic work, however, they themselves become thematic. Like other parameters of photography, they are at the service of basic photographic research, which the artist has been conducting for 25 years now. In Sauer's works, each of these colours is represented by a pixel in a hue of the RGB (red-green-blue) spectrum. This generates images with colour-intensive motifs from digital communication as well as latent images of a grey noise that contains all possible images.
To speak of possible images naturally means having an idea of what photography is fundamentally capable of depicting. A look at the history of photography and its theory makes it clear that the question of what reality photography actually shows and how it does so has been and is answered very differently. What role does objectivity play, and what role does the manipulation of photographic images with filters and editing programmes play? What are the consequences of the digitalisation of photography and the use of artificial intelligence to generate images?
Can a photographic image still lay claim to truth in the present day? Adrian Sauer approaches these questions by portraying the possibilities of digital photography and at the same time critically exploring its limits. In Sauer's work, intellectual clarity is always combined with a pinch of humour. Truth Table is the artist's first solo exhibition in Austria and offers a comprehensive insight into his oeuvre to date.

The exhibition is being organised in cooperation with the Sprengel Museum Hannover.