For his seventh solo show at Anton Kern Gallery, English artist Saul Fletcher is presenting thirty new photographs all taken inside the artist’s new abode in Berlin, Germany, over the past year. A fifty-six page, fully illustrated catalog entitled 13 will be published in collaboration with Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich, for the exhibition.
After a transitional period of taking pictures outdoors and re-visiting early images of friends and family, Fletcher has returned to the familiar construct of his studio wall. This time however, he has taken the wall with him and reinstated it in a new environment. Fletcher “understands his own wall as a sea captain understands the oceanic temperament” (Dan Fox, Nocturama, 2005/2006). Smudges and erasure marks, rough drawings and signs pinned to the wall, a variety of delicate found objects as well as a cast of characters closely connected to the artist are all positioned in front of the wall and compose the fine-tuned vocabulary of Fletcher’s photographs. The artist’s own biography may be the initial inspiration for these images, but it is their universal quality that transforms them into documents of poetry.
Eyes dance imaginative reels across their surface crust, and the walls absorb blows of frustration when events outside their cubic embrace have not been sympathetic to us. They are immovably resolute sentinels, crutches that steady when we wish to stay still. A wall looks flat only to those who are strangers to it. (Dan Fox, Nocturama, 2005/2006)