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Ideale Landschaft 1968
museum edition: 8 copies (unfinished); public edition: 750 copies
(Colour-sample book Nr. 2), 6 blockprints by Brehmer and a text by Jürgen Becker

The artist's book »Ideal Landscape« was conceived as a »public edition« in an edition of 750 as well as a »museum edition« in an edition of eight for Edition Block. While only one prototype of the museum edition - a large-format book with six cliché prints on art paper in a cassette - was produced due to a lack of demand, the smaller-format public edition in spiral binding was published in the planned edition of 750. Both versions follow the concept of a color sample book, in each of which six cliché prints reproduce the motif of a landscape in various shades of green with a tonal value scale. The pages of the bound edition are trimmed in such a way that the color grid scales on the right-hand edge can be viewed like a register. How is the »ideal« landscape constituted? Brehmer does not approach this question in the medium of romanticized landscape painting, which synthesizes such an image from idealized notions of nature. Rather, he takes the opposite approach and uses a found landscape reproduction to unfold the technological possibilities of contemporary reproduction processes by analyzing the color and tonal values in order to demonstrate the functions and modes of action of the »media complex«. The ironic ambivalence of the phrase »Ideal Landscape«, which in no way conjures up a beautiful ideal, but rather reveals the construction of images under media conditions and exploitation logics, is also made clear by the text written by Jürgen Becker at the invitation of Brehmer, which brings the examination of land and landscape into the political present of the 1960s.