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Galerie Maubert presents the work of German photographer Irmel Kamp (born in 1937, lives and works in Aachen) for the first time in Paris. This inaugural exhibition showcases her black-and-white series created in Europe, spanning fifty years of her career fifty years of her career, and offering a renewed perspective on architectural modernity. The exhibition thus brings together works from the series Zink (1978-82), Bruxelles-Bruxelles (1996/97), and Moderne in Europa (1998-2006). Irmel Kamp approaches architecture in a similar way to how one might approach human subjects. Her photographs highlight individual buildings, their architectural, formal, or aesthetic characteristics, as well as their history, thoroughly researched and documented both before and after. This is why the photographer also focuses on the environments surrounding these buildings: landscapes and urban fabric shaped layer by layer by the people who live or have lived there. The complexity of the infrastructures and networks in which the buildings are integrated is neither hidden nor retouched. It is omnipresent: telephone poles on rooftops, clusters of cables, lamps attached to houses, as well as building debris, cracks in plaster, quick repairs, decay, and stylistic disruptions. These remnants remind us that buildings are not autonomous structures and exist only in interaction with other structures, both human and non-human. Natural and civilizational structures, construction, unplanned and irregular use, and improvisation meet in evolving temporal layers. Disorder is the rule here. It is an integral part of history. Even the most purist architecture does not escape it, but these imperfections also make it more accessible. ‘‘It took me time to understand that perhaps architecture is a mess: but a mess which is as much aesthetic as social and institutional. In the end this mess is not a threat, but an opportunity.’’