TATA RONKHOLZ | Trinkhallen

Edited by Zander Galerie (Thomas Zander) and Van Ham Art Estate (Markus Eisenbeis, Renate Goldmann)

Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne 

192 pages

With an essay by Andreas Rossmann

“The kiosk is the last hope when you’re out of coffee and cigarettes, or if you want to quickly buy a whodunnit. Of course there are also lollies and chocolate, chocolate marshmallows and waffles – all those little things that remind you of childhood. a little bit of charity bazaar and fun fair.” – Heinrich Böll, 1972

Each one is different, each is unique. Kiosks have a lot in common – in form and format, function and assortment, but they never look the same. Perhaps they are sometimes similar, but they never can be confused with one another; there is no prototype, no standard model. Nonetheless they would be easy to construct as elementary, sub-complex architecture that could be standardized and varied with the cube or cuboid as the basic form…

Tata Ronkholz (1940 – 1997) was a German artist and photographer. Her work shows elements of urban architecture, which due to their transient nature turn the photographs into valuable historical documents. Along with Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth, Ronkholz was among the first students of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Even before she began to study with Bernd and Hilla Becher in 1978, she made her first black and white photographs of industrial sites, which she took with a view camera only during the winter months, so the vegetation would not cover up the structure of the gates. Ronkholz’s perhaps best known and most extensive series is Trinkhallen: kiosks and small shops around the corner that are witnesses of social neighbourhoods and vernacular cultures, which mostly do not exist anymore. Ronkholz found her characteristic subjects in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Bochum, and parts of the Rhineland.