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“Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.”
- Sol Lewitt,
Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.
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Exit signs, waypoints punctuating our daily experience. Ubiquitous to the point of banality, we see without seeing these signifiers of our constructed realities. Photographs of exit signs – deliberately affectless, depersonalised, and repetitive – are both a reflection on Warhol’s multiple ‘assembly line’ works, and a subversive appropriation of our global language.
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This series of 1024 exit signs, taken over ten years as spontaneous gestures, not staged or planned, form a coherent pictorial strategy. Inverting a telescope on the mundane, the signs are photographed close-up, with minimal background context. Depriving the viewer of scale and cultural references, the signs are universalised, and elevated to the realm of symbol. Drawing on Adorno’s theory of Mimesis, they form an archive, framed like specimens pinned on a card.
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But the series moves beyond the obvious readymade associations, with each work serving not only as a reminder of a specific place and time, but as a trigger for situational awareness and philosophical reflection. Corresponding to situation where the artist felt physically present but mentally detached, each exit sign led to a moment of clarity, a call to action.
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The exit signs are more than a physical navigation point, they aim to create an awareness of the situations we find ourselves in. They are a signal to wake up, to be present.
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In this constructed reality, the exit sign is a catalyst for reflection: who am I, what am I, where am I going?
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At times we navigate our lives on auto-pilot. The exit signs speak of an urgency: be present.
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About Florian Reinhardt
Florian Reinhardt (b. 1978) has 20 years of experience in the Film business. He is one of the most successful producers of Reality Television, which isn't his dream. The missing freedom of his childhood inspired his love of stories and pictures. Words are beautiful, pictures even more so. His passion for capturing signs over many years of travelling has now grown into a significant body of work, comprising over 1.000 EXIT signs. It started in South Beach Miami. An EXIT sign with two lights on top, one which was broken. It seemed to reflect his mood: physically present, mentally not. EXIT.
The EXIT signs can be old, new, beat up or polished. They are always there. Everywhere. They in some way mirror life: they are placed where life is writing it's story and they always show the way out. For the artist EXIT is an opportunity to let go of the captivity of compulsion, and be to present.
He currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany.
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