- Year of birth, place
- 1946, Colmar, France
- Role at the ZKM
- in the collection
- Biography
- Jean-Louis Schoellkopf was born in Colmar in 1946. He now lives in Saint-Etienne.
Schoellkopf has worked with photography since the early 1970s, most of his output being documentary in character. His first work, carried out in Montreal, consisted of records of workers and their working conditions. In 1974 he settled in Saint-Etienne, a heavily industrialized French city with a strongly working-class population and character. Since then he has recorded the transformation of this city, for example through series of photographs of housing estates and their inhabitants. Schoellkopf sees Saint-Etienne as a model case for the observation of processes such as the communication of ideologies through an architectural language. A parallel photographic series has been devoted to images of food shortly before its preparation into a meal. Schoellkopf sees a connection between man's treatment of sources of physical nourishment and the architectural design of his immediate surroundings. He draws a parallel between the contemporary urban architecture of Saint-Etienne and modern, pre-prepared frozen foods. These last are juxtaposed, in his series 'Food' (»Nourriture«), with images of freshly slaughtered animals. Schoellkopf is thus able to emphasize these aspects of contemporary society as embodiments of enormous social change and the growing uncertainty that is inherent in such change.
Individual exhibitions (selection)
1986 Galerie Noselans, Saint-Etienne
1988 Galerie Ils Arrivent, Saint-Etienne
1989 La Serre, École des Beaux-Arts, Saint-Etienne
1990 Casa del Lago, Institut Français d'Amerique Latine, Mexico-City
1991 »Typologies 1991«, Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne
1992 »Typologies«, Kubus, Hannover, subsequently at Camera Obscura, Tel Aviv
1994 »Athos«, Musée de la Banque Nationale, Thessaloniki
Group exhibitions (selection)
1981 »Lieux du Travail«, Maison de la Culture, Saint-Etienne, subsequently at Musée Déchelette, Roanne
1982 »Exposition de Noël«, Le nouveau Musée, Villeurbanne
1985 École d'Architecture, Nantes
1987 »Entrevues«, Grenoble
1988 »Le corps figuré 2«, Fondation Nationale de la Photographie, Lyon; »Descriptions photographiques, quatre artistes en Rhône-Alpes«, Landespavillon, Stuttgart; »De l'ambiguité«, Centre Régional de la Photographie, Douchy les Mines
1991 »A Dialogue about Recent American and European Photography«, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; »Lieux communs, figures singulières«, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
1993 »Alexanderpolder projekt«, Kunsthal Rotterdam; »Histoires de voir«, Chateau de Villeneuve, Vence; »Faigenbaum, Moulene, Schoellkopf«, Mishkan Le'omanut Museum of Art, Ein Harod
1995 »Typologies urbaines I«, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne; Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris
1996 École des Beaux-Arts, Rouen
1997»Homo Ecologicus«, Fondació Joan Miró, Barcelona; »Art dans la ville«, Musée de la mine, Saint-Etienne; »Feuilleton«, Podewil, Berlin; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; documenta X, Kassel
[Konstanze Thümmel, 1997]
