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DaFeng Gallery is honored to host noted Austrian photographers Paul Albert Leitner and Martin Krulis' first exhibition in China. Mr. Leitner and Mr. Krulis have both worked and exhibited in locales ranging from Vienna to New York, Mexico City, Lagos, Havana, Nizhny Novgorad, Seuol, and Beijing, Fengning and Xilinhot. The exhibition opens November 13th and will run until December 12th.

As sensitive as Paul Albert Leitner is to the poetry of everyday life, he is matter-of-fact and objective in his photographic approach, and something of a documentarist. In his new art book he takes a look at signs and advertising. On countless journeys in Europe and its post-socialist fringes, in the Hispanic world, in New York’s urban space and the American south, Leitner finds images of at times seductive, at times repugnant, nostalgic-romantic or turbo-capitalist billboards, advertising hoardings and other public signs. He is not, however, a travel photographer, someone attracted by the exotic in foreign climes. The individual photo is actually the poetry, with narratives, personal autobiographical and entire world histories created as a series of images or book. In 0—24 Leitner frees the facades of their imposed clarity, literally revealing their concrete form and colour. Like Atget he opens up the surreal levels inherent to economic activities that appear to be so targeted. Thomas Miessgang

Krulis has taken the lessons of Eggleston and Friedlander and applied them, making compelling photographs of subjects that are often banal and not inherently visual. Krulis locates everyday objects within his camera and transforms them to capture friction and tension, thereby challenging the viewer to see the world from Krulis’s unique perspective. Each image reveals surprising developments of color and texture. The works here are alternately intimate and distant from their subject matter. Nevertheless the viewpoint and connecting story is always distinctly Martin‘s. Robert Mann
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