BRAUNSCHWEIG.- In an overview and selection of important works and groups of works created over the past 12 years, the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig will be showing photographic works, objects, and film works by Andrzej Steinbach from September 27, 2025, presenting his latest group of works, Erweiterungen/Extensions (since 2024) comprehensively for the first time in Germany.

With this current series, Andrzej Steinbach continues his precise, minimalist photographic staging practice, staging mostly neutral-looking “figures” as typified, gender-neutral representatives in equally neutralized spatial environments and with clothing from work contexts or neutral streetwear. Through gestural and posed interactions with objects from the world of work, the person appearing in the group of works brings to mind aspects and contextual shifts of economic, cultural, social, and gender-specific attributions from the technically oriented world of work, while at the same time establishing references to the genre of portraiture.

In this regard, the media-reflective series Der Apparat (2019) was also exemplary in view of the works presented in the exhibition. The person recurring in the photographs appears with different cameras. The gestures and poses of their use appear as references to different creative as well as political and social contexts. Several works from the series will be on display.

In addition to the series of images that focus on the relationship between humans and objects, and thus always refer to cultural-historical, sociological, and social aspects, while at the same time dissolving familiar aspects of content attributions into ambiguities, technical objects and tools also appear in the color and black-and-white series Auto Erotik (2022) and Disassembling a Typewriter (2022). Here and there, the titles and thus the linguistic level of the works and work groups of Andrzej Steinbach become important design elements.

Born in Czarnków, Poland, in 1983, Andrzej Steinbach grew up in Karl-Marx-Stadt (renamed Chemnitz after 1989), studied at the HGB Leipzig, and now lives and works in Berlin. He has already been awarded important prizes and scholarships, and with his cross-media works and installations, he is one of the artists of a younger generation in Germany who can already look back on important exhibitions internationally.

His 35-piece series Gesellschaft beginnt mit drei (2017) was exhibited in 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among other venues. The series was shown several years ago at the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig in the context of the Wüstenrot Foundation’s important documentary photography award projects, and the Sprengel Museum Hannover has also exhibited some of Andrzej Steinbach’s works in the region.

With this newly conceived exhibition, the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig aims to provide an initial overview of the various facets of Andrzej Steinbach’s work through a selection of important pieces.