IKOB
PINK DEPRESSION
With Barbara & Michael Leisgen
23/06/2026 – 20/09/2026
After meeting in art school in Karlsruhe in the 1960s, Barbara and Michael Leisgen abandoned their respective disciplines of painting and sculpture to pursue work as an artist duo. They chose analog photography as a their medium, as they found it to depend less on facture—the material evidence of the artist’s making embedded in the artwork—and therefore well-suited to equal collaboration. The couple first settled in East Belgium, where they worked for many years before moving to nearby Aachen, across the German border. Although they traveled all over Europe for their work, many of the duo’s photographs were shot in Belgium—including the image from the Pink Depression series, captured in and around rivers and brooks polluted by waste from a nearby aluminum plant.
The Leisgens were never formally trained in photography and approached the medium from a conceptual standpoint: they considered the camera as a tool and the film as a physical material, both of which could be manipulated. With Mimesis and their later series Sonnenschriften (Sunwritings)—in which they used sunlight to burn letters into the negatives—Barbara & Michael Leisgen wanted to explore what they perceived as an ancient human inclination to mimic nature and its forms. These works urge us to reconnect with the stars, the Earth, and the sky, and to “read what has never been written,” as they put it.
In Pink Depression, the Leisgens’ concern for the exploitation of the environment becomes more explicit: Barbara is no longer upright but horizontal and therefore vulnerable, her body contaminated by the landscape rather than just visually tracing it. Her silhouette and appearance are coded as feminine, yet the pink clothing contrasts starkly with the atmosphere of danger, death, and decay looming over the photographs.
Rotenberg 12b
4700 Eupen
