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The New Yorker

Galleries - Chelsea

May 09, 2011

The German photographer, known for large-scale computer-manipulated images with unusual points of view, shows engaging color pictures made a year ago in Japan. Gefeller's subjects-trees, vines, telephone wires-are ordinary, but he turns them into intricate abstractions. In Nearly every picture, he's recording objects overhead but removing evidence of their support; there are no telephone poles, no tree trunks. Seen against white or black skies, wires massed at transformers suggest congested expressway maps, and the vines in a grape arbor look like a series of broken veins held together by an eccentric grid. Photography and drawing share a common graphic language.