The beauty of architecture, the power of perspective, and the moment when reality gives way to imagination lie at the heart of the works of Ben Johnson and Christian Höhn. GALERIE VON&VON presents the first joint exhibition of these two internationally renowned artists, inviting visitors to enter their distinctive visual worlds and momentarily lose themselves within them. A compelling tension arises between Johnson’s painterly precision and Höhn’s photographic clarity, in which the boundaries between reality and imagination become increasingly blurred.
Architecture surrounds us, shapes our perception, and moulds our surroundings. Yet its significance ultimately emerges through the people who perceive, use, and bring it to life. Johnson and Höhn deliberately turn this relationship on its head. By largely removing people from their images, they make architecture itself the silent protagonist. What remains are spaces and urban landscapes that transcend their original function, taking on an extraordinary sense of tranquillity, clarity, and grandeur. In everyday life, our gaze is constantly shaped by a multitude of stimuli. People, movements, sounds and the events unfolding around us compete for our attention. Johnson and Höhn, by contrast, create works in which these distractions disappear. The absence of people opens up a different perspective on the smallest details, surfaces, proportions, and spatial relationships, and allows us to see familiar environments anew.
The exhibition brings together two distinct media that reveal a surprisingly similar artistic approach. Both artists share an extraordinary patience in their intensive engagement with the places they depict. Their architectural spaces and urban landscapes do not arise from a fleeting glance, but are the result of months of observation, research and preparation. What ultimately appears in each work is the result of an extensive process of selection and construction, guided by a conscious decision to adopt a particular viewpoint. Light, time of day, geometry, surface, and perspective are carefully explored, refined, and distilled into precise visual compositions.
In his meticulously crafted acrylic paintings, Ben Johnson combines real buildings, memories, and constructed perspectives to create spaces that exist somewhere between observation and imagination. Christian Höhn approaches architecture with the precision of photography, removing it from its everyday context and transforming it into timeless visual realities. Their distinctive luminosity is further intensified through presentation as lightboxes and acrylic prints.
The absence of people heightens the peculiar timelessness of these images. The resulting spaces appear simultaneously real and impossible, familiar and alien, present and past. Johnson and Höhn create perfect places whose true story only begins when viewed. The silence inherent in their works, together with the tangible presence and grandeur of deserted architecture, leaves room for the imagination. The works invite us to slow down, to look more closely, and ultimately to rediscover our own perception.