"I am explaining that every person from where he may be or from whatever social background he is coming… should obtain the opportunity to know himself and to work with himself with the help of these "elementary demonstrations of reality". Most people are hampered because of their more or less complete integration into the battle for existence and they are attached to certain forms of living which take their course in them and with them. The study of this book -Klaus Rinke: Zeit / Time - Raum / Space - Körper / Body - Handlungen / Transformations", A. Götz, 1972- could signify something like a starting factor in order to become conscious of the basic structures of individual being…. The artist should have the opportunity to place environmental situations in a way that they are useful for consciousness. These situations should not limit somebody but they should help to free activities. For instance people should be continuously conscious of time in their environment. By this experience everybody could measure the degree of intensity or dullness of the life he is living."
Prototype – Photographs from the Seventies showcases some of Rinke’s most iconic works, brought together here to convey the richness and variety of that experimental decade. Among them is “Mutation (1970)” — an installation of 112 photographs that analyze, with almost scientific rigor, the relationship between face, gesture, time, and transformation. “Der Wasserträger (1970)” stages the elemental action of lifting buckets of water, turning it into a measure of duration, balance, and repetition. Finally, “Hineingehen und herauskommen – Rentrer Sortir”, created for the Tokyo Biennale in 1970, deconstructs the performative action of ascending and descending the museum’s staircase into an analytical sequence that interrogates space, movement, and perception. The exhibition also includes a previously unseen series of photographs taken by Rinke in Japan in 1972, titled The German Buddha, in which the artist continues to explore the body and its gestures in relation to space, playing with the tension between temples, evocative landscapes, and Eastern architectures. Presented in dialogue with one another, these works reveal the breadth of his conceptual approach and open the exhibition with a visual and methodological force that defines his entire practice.
In the 1970s, Rinke developed a visual language in which the body becomes both a measuring instrument and a principle of inquiry: a device capable of questioning time, space, and presence through minimal gestures, controlled postures, and analytical sequences. His photographs do not function as mere documentation of performances, but as true “visual experiments”: fragments of an almost scientific investigation in which the artist’s body becomes a universal unit, subject to forces, durations, and proportions.
The exhibition proposes a new reading of these historical investigations—not as archival material, but as tools still active today for understanding the relationship between the self and the world, and what remains irreducible in human experience.
In an era of new temporalities and increasing dematerialization, Rinke demonstrates how a simple, immediate gesture — “pressing the button” — can turn into a manifesto of total presence, capable of capturing the very essence of living.
