News 2006

Wed 1 March 2006
Michael Wesely. Begegnung mit Caspar David Friedrich

Michael Wesely. Encounters with Caspar David Friedrich Until 7 May 2006, the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin is showing three large-scale photographs by Michael Weseley in the Caspar-David-Friedrich-Room of the Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery). The photographer Wesely's "East German landscapes" approach Friedrich's paintings with suprising harmoniousness. The landscapes are photographed with a slit camera, that is a camera with a mere slit opening instead of a lens. Pointed at the horizon, it contracts the landscape's tonal atmospheres and colour layers, so that the resulting layered images appear like abstract paintings. In comparing the photographs with Friedrich's landscapes it becomes obvious how very interested Friedrich was in the atmospheric colour changes of the horizontal planes merging in the horizon. The "natural" colours captured by the camera affirm Caspar David Friedrich's approach with stunning clarity. This is particularly evident in the expansive landscapes which portray the horizon as the metaphorical undisturbed line between heaven and earth. Within Friedrich's work, the "Monk by the Sea" represents the formal culmination of this religious view of nature. This masterpiece is currently on display in the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) as part of the exhibition "Melancholie. Genius and Madness in Art".