Michael Wesely

Two colour fields, rich in nuances, a horizontal meeting point in the middle of the picture: that's what we register. Without a title indicating a possible link to landscapes, interpretation would be difficult. But these are photographs, the medium favoured by Michael Wesely (*1963 Munich, DE), fascinated as he is by the wealth of possibilities photography has to offer. Although his photographs always have a subject, the length of exposure or the shape of the lens produce visual results that escape the artist's influence: while Wesely chooses the camera, the location and the exposure time, darkness literally surrounds everything else. Ostdeutsche Landschaften reproduces impressions of nature that have been transformed by the use of a slit camera in the photography process into the strip images shown. These images are more reminiscent, at first sight, of abstract painting than of photographs. The vision of the landscape seen through the lens thus also becomes a reflection on photography itself and questions the very meaning of nature, the image and technology.