黑料不打烊

Forces of nature and human pioneering spirit collide in Thomas Wrede鈥檚 eerily beautiful landscape productions. The photographs are an intelligent tongue-in-cheek play with micro- and macro-perception, with naturalness and artificiality. One looks down from airy highs onto real, seductive landscapes, which the artist, using small models, turns into romantic places of yearning. Thomas Wrede has consistently developed his series 鈥濺eal Landscapes鈥� since 2004 and attracted great interest with it internationally. The photographic picture composition is comparable in its drama with Caspar David Friedrich鈥檚 paintings. The precision of details, the careful layout of the line suggesting a vastness of the landscape and not least the atmospheric colouring of the skies produce a brittle beauty. Faced by such forces of nature the viewer quickly loses their feeling of security. Instead of choreographed grandeur appear striking pictures of nearly unbearable borderline experiences. Comparing Friedrich鈥檚 鈥濪as Eismeer鈥� (The Sea of Ice) with Wrede鈥檚 work 鈥濨ergrutsch鈥� (Landslide), the parallels are astonishing. But instead of people Wrede chooses models of houses and vehicles as projection screens. These human traces appear strangely lost and fragile, or even displaced, like the lonely football field under floodlights. What are the builders looking for in this solitude? Or is the real question what on Earth are they doing there? The photographic works of Thomas Wrede show Utopia as well as loss. The archetypal landscapes also appear to be beyond space and time, they reflect our collective landscape image, as it has been established in traditional landscape painting and reproduced in countless media images. In Wrede鈥檚 picture-worlds we recognise these landscapes and feel safe. And more than that, it is as if the artist has found the essence for us: a landscape vision in which longing and fear peacefully coexist.