黑料不打烊

In his artistic works, Manfred Willmann explores the outer limits of perception. His highly saturated colour photographs do not document the time and space in which they were created, but rather are an expression of the photo artist鈥檚 subjective observations. In its first exhibition of the Austrian artist鈥檚 work, Galerie Priska Pasquer is presenting pieces from the cycle entitled 鈥淒as Land鈥� (The Countryside), created between 1981 and 1993 during a time of increasing technologisation and multimedialisation. These analogue photographs demonstrate an aesthetic of a kind that is constantly striven for in the digital age with the help of digital cameras and image editing programs.

The 鈥渃ountryside鈥� images are exceptionally colour-intensive. Just as William Eggleston focused on chromatic elements in the 1976 MoMA exhibition, Willmann uses colour as his chosen form of artistic expression. With acute sensitivity, Willmann photographed natural landscapes and human interaction in an abstract-looking rural environment. Although taken with an affectionate eye, the photos do not veil the brutality of natural decay. By using a bright camera flash, even in broad daylight, the artist reveals the unsightly details as well. Close inspection will reveal contextual cross-references and aesthetic interconnections. Rather than a one-dimensional idyll, 鈥淒as Land鈥� is a marriage of the familiar and the unfamiliar, of the near and the far, of the living and the dying. In spite of maximum proximity and hyper-real depiction, the nature of the 鈥渃ountryside鈥� remains wholly impenetrable.