pool gallery presents:

Patrick Hoelck:
"TAR""

Opening Reception: Friday, March 26th, 18:00 - 22:00
Exhibition: March 27th - May 3rd, 2010

TAR is the anti-drug.

To be more precise, it is street-slang terminology for the drug itself.
However, for american photographer Patrick Hoelck, the TAR series signifies near death and resurrection; the single act of making it saved his life, pulling him out of the underworld and into sobriety - and contemporary photography.

Beguiled by an addiction to the lucrative advertising and popular music industries in his early career, Hoelck was consumed by an indulgent obsession with technical and aesthetic perfection. This saturation in “the industry“ soon led to intolerance that ignited his lust for the beauty of authenticity. Appreciation of natural imperfections in both subject and camera became intrinsic to his work resulting in exacting experimentation-turned-mastry of in-camera techniques. At a time when perfectionism was inextricably inbedded in the art of photography - ca. 2000 - Hoelck‘s steps back into the camera were noteworthy for their deviation from fashionable opinion, and have become signature of his work, evident in both TAR and HOTEL.

Hoelck’s work resonates with a signature darkness, or a reality that does not lie for or distort its subjects. Hoelck boldly presents his subjects as they are, permitting the model to expose who she is, who she wants to be, and how she loves herself - resulting in the real and unpolished human sensuality that he is so able to capture.

One might argue that reality is therefore the focus of Hoelck‘s TAR and HOTEL series. No styling, no set design, and no post-production; real people in front of a real camera on real film. Accepting the imperfections in himself, his subjects, his camera and the pictures it creates - and recognizing the beauty therein - is what became Hoelck‘s greatest inspiration and strongest catalyst in leaving street-TAR for his TAR project and beyond.

This is Patrick Hoelck’s first solo-exhibition in Berlin. He lives and works between Los Angeles and New York City.