Dieter Jung – The Light Behind

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin is pleased to present works by the artist Dieter Jung in the exhibition The Light Behind. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see a concentrated selection of his groundbreaking holographic art. At its centre are the work Pendulum und sein Schatten and the holograms, accompanied by paintings, drawings, and graphic works from the past decades.

The exhibition’s standout feature is a vibrant holographic forest—a spectacle in constant dialogue with the ever-shifting light conditions of both the gallery interior and the exterior space by the garden-facing windows. This part of the exhibition transforms hour by hour, making the holographic image a dynamic visual phenomenon that transcends individual perspectives. Functioning as translucent canvases, the holograms become artistic moments unfolding in the present, embodying the aesthetics of the moment in a direct sense—a form of kairos poetry.

The concept of the exhibition centres on the hologram, Dieter Jung’s passion and the medium that earned him his worldwide reputation. The hologram is fractally structured: each individual segment of the image body contains the whole. Even when fragmented, the entire composition remains visible. This principle also applies to the individual works in the exhibition, which have been carefully selected so that each piece reflects Jung’s vast oeuvre of more than 20,000 works.

Dieter Jung began exploring the particle–wave dualism of quantum physics in his paintings in the 1970s while living in New York and Paris. His delicate coloured-pencil drawings are meticulous studies of how lines and subtle colour nuances can be brought into harmonious relationships. His large-format canvas paintings both anticipate and reflect his light art.

The artistic network in which Dieter Jung developed includes the ZERO artists Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, and Günther Uecker, as well as the colour and geometry explorations of Gerhard Richter. A reference to Alexander Calder appears in the finely crafted mobile Navigator (1996/97), which hovers in front of the painting See Through Landscape (1982), forming what seems to be an inseparable unity.

The exhibition also presents a selection of Jung’s lesser-known works, which nonetheless epitomise the extreme heterogeneity of his oeuvre. His close collaboration with leading intellectuals of the twentieth century is reflected in a text-experimental hologram dedicated to Prague-based cultural philosopher Vilém Flusser. Peter Weibel—who curated Jung’s most comprehensive solo exhibition to date at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in 2019—also appears as a reference point.

— Siegfried Zielinski

Dieter Jung, born in 1941 in Bad Wildungen, Germany, studied theology, painting, graphic art, and film studies in Berlin and Paris. Since 1965, his pioneering holographic works have been exhibited internationally, earning him worldwide recognition.

In his wide-ranging body of paintings, drawings, graphics, and installations, viewers are invited into a play of colour and light, surface and space.

Alongside his artistic practice, Jung served as a research fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 1985 to 1989. He was a member of the founding council of the Academy of Media Arts (Kunsthochschule für Medien) in Cologne in 1990/91 and worked there as Professor of Creative Holography and Light Art until 2007. From 1992 to 1996, he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and since 2010 he has served on the Academic Advisory Board of the ZERO Foundation in Düsseldorf. The artist’s archive and a significant selection of his works are held in the collection of the ZKM in Karlsruhe, which honoured him with a solo exhibition in 2019.

Today, Dieter Jung lives and works in Berlin.