Steffi Klenz's Concrete Thinking at Sid Motion Gallery explores photography's materiality and modernist legacies

Steffi Klenz's exhibition Concrete Thinking at Sid Motion Gallery in London runs through 23 July, featuring works that interrogate photography's position between information and aesthetics. The show includes two series: Tensed Muscles (2021) and A Scholar's Rock (2022). Tensed Muscles consists of large plywood panels resembling billboards, layered with photographs, newspaper clippings, and graphic elements referencing the Maiden Lane housing estate in London, with images of hands wearing condoms and nods to constructivist modernism like El Lissitzky. A Scholar's Rock presents wall-mounted sculptures with collages combining pencil drawings of Chinese scholar's rocks and fragments of Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion. Klenz's work emphasizes materiality, decelerating images through photographic, reprographic, and drawn techniques bonded to frames and objects reminiscent of modernist architecture. The exhibition avoids didacticism, instead meditating on visual communication registers—news, typography, symbol, metaphor—and the ghosts of twentieth-century modernism, recalling utopian hopes of social transformation. It contrasts Maiden Lane with Mies's pavilion, exploring contemplation, image power, and integrating vision into a social, material world beyond digital screens.