Thomas Kellner - Fragmented Icons

Frankfurt. From 1 October to 8 November 2025, German fine art photographer Thomas Kellner will be presenting his work at the PanGallery in Frankfurt. Thomas Kellner’s photographic works go far beyond mere architectural representations – they offer a critical examination of the cultural and symbolic layers embedded in their subjects. By systematically deconstructing world-famous architectural icons and capturing them on 35mm film, Kellner reassembles the images into large-scale tableaus. These compositions transform familiar forms into unsettling, visually fragmented image spaces, challenging conventional readings and placing them in new contexts.

In Kellner’s artistic approach, architectural icons—internationally recognizable buildings that have transcended their functional roles to become symbolic representatives of cities, nations, and ideologies—are the focal point. These “building icons” function as visual stand-ins in the collective imagination, embodying specific values, histories, or political messages. Their iconic status is not just based on singular design but also on media presence and the cultural narratives they carry.

Kellner presents these icons not as monumental unities, but as visually deconstructed structures. Take the Eiffel Tower, for example: where its architecture typically converges into a single vertical peak supported by four iron girders, Kellner disrupts this stability. His photographic reconstruction fragments the tower’s silhouette, multiplying the summit and breaking the iconic form, making the structure appear unstable—almost fragile. The traditional visual order based on clear vertical and horizontal axes dissolves. Only at the meta level—visible in the film contact sheets—does a reference grid remain, both guiding orientation and simultaneously questioning the image's visual coherence. This approach is deeply rooted in Cubism, a key influence in Kellner’s development, where traditional central perspective gives way to a new visual language that reimagines space.

Architecture promises permanence, order, and protection, but Kellner radically challenges these assumptions. What remains is a visual shimmer, a cartographic search for the cultural codes embedded in architecture. These photographs act as visual maps of cultural memory, where the motifs are fragmented, reassembled, and transferred into a distinct system of order, not to document reality, but to expose the visual knowledge shaped by society.

Mapping becomes a core artistic strategy, an investigative, intervening method of engaging with space. It tests boundaries and shifts familiar ways of seeing. Each icon is reflected upon individually while being integrated into a broader network—a visual fabric stretching from Germany to London, Paris, and Washington. Recurring architectural forms point to transnational references, making clear that architecture is not only built space but also a carrier of collective imagination that transcends political and geographical borders.

Architecture is an expression of social order. To portray it is not just to depict forms but to depict worldviews. And to deconstruct it, as Kellner does, is to make these orders visible, to question them, and to expose their fragility. This dimension is especially evident in Kellner’s representations of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The fragmented, destabilized, and seemingly collapsing structure becomes a metaphor for political turmoil, a visual symbol of a fragile democracy. In the wake of societal events such as the storming of the Capitol in January 2021, these works gained unexpected resonance, widely shared and discussed in the media as symbols of collective insecurity.

Kellner’s focus is not the Eiffel Tower or Tower Bridge themselves, but their representations—visual stand-ins that utilize architectural silhouettes while reloading them with conceptual meaning. What remains is the echo of iconic forms, detached, fragmented, deconstructed. The viewer searches for order, attempts to reassemble the fragments into a cohesive whole, but Kellner’s images resist closure. This fragmentation acts as aesthetic resistance, disrupting habitual patterns of seeing while heightening awareness of the visual codes that permeate modern cultural memory.

Deconstruction becomes a method, not of dissolution, but of revelation. Kellner’s practice is artistic mapping: a reimagining of space that undermines its supposed stability. His broken visual cells do not offer architectural reliability. On the contrary, the monumental gesture, its promise of permanence, order, and protection, is fundamentally shaken. What remains is a visual flicker, a rhythmically shimmering tableau of cultural codes inscribed in what we thought we knew.

Thomas Kellner - Fragmented Icons
1.10.-8.11.2025
PanGallery Frankfurt
Bernussstraße 18, 60487 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Vernissage: October 1st, 2025, 7.00 p.m
Chiara Manon Bohn will speak at the opening

Exhibition opening hours:
Thu. + Fri. 02.30 p.m - 6.30 p.m 
Sat.          11.00 a.m - 2.00 p.m

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