Axel Hütte
15 Sep - 29 Oct 2011
AXEL HÜTTE
Rheingau
15 September - 29 October, 2011
Axel Hütte will be presenting his work at the Helga de Alvear gallery once again, with a recent project on this occasion. Well-known for his landscape works, Hütte attempts to capture Nature’s intangibility through his photographs. His images are devoid of human presence, and break down reality into an almost abstract vision.
Rheingau is the name given to the agricultural region that lies along the bank of the Middle Rhine River, between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt am Main. It is particularly well known for its wine, and for its popular Riesling variety in particular, as it benefits from a particularly benign microclimate and a long winemaking tradition. During the Grand Tour, its territory, speckled with castles and abbeys, many of them in ruin, became one of the points of attraction for the first tourists of the nineteenth century.
The vision of the romantic landscape -sublime or picturesque-, which reached mass popularity towards the end of the nineteenth century, finds here its perfect leitmotif, and soon takes shape in broadly distributed mementos and souvenirs. The appearance of photography spread the distribution of these images even further, particularly through postcards. Between 1900 and the 1950s, this vision was transmitted on millions of occasions, thus establishing an imagery that, to a large extent, still persists today.
In this project, Axel Hütte investigates this process of the production, establishment and transmission of images, and of the construction of collective memory. To this end, he has selected around 300 postcards from anonymous photographers, which, as a group, summarise and expose this model. The result is an itinerary through the history of photographic representation, and of the impression that it manages to turn the familiar into the uncanny, and the uncanny into the familiar. At the same time, he will also present his own images of this territory in defence of the individuality of a vision of the world, and of the subject’s capacity to marvel before the world.
Axel Hütte (Essen, Germany, 1951) studied at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf under the guidance of the Beechers, and then continued his studies in London and Paris. He began to exhibit his work in the 80s. The main theme running through his work is the landscape, which he confronts by questioning the art tradition.
In our country, he has presented his work at the IVAM (Valencia), at the Fundación Telefónica (Madrid), and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía MNCARS, (Madrid).
Rheingau
15 September - 29 October, 2011
Axel Hütte will be presenting his work at the Helga de Alvear gallery once again, with a recent project on this occasion. Well-known for his landscape works, Hütte attempts to capture Nature’s intangibility through his photographs. His images are devoid of human presence, and break down reality into an almost abstract vision.
Rheingau is the name given to the agricultural region that lies along the bank of the Middle Rhine River, between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt am Main. It is particularly well known for its wine, and for its popular Riesling variety in particular, as it benefits from a particularly benign microclimate and a long winemaking tradition. During the Grand Tour, its territory, speckled with castles and abbeys, many of them in ruin, became one of the points of attraction for the first tourists of the nineteenth century.
The vision of the romantic landscape -sublime or picturesque-, which reached mass popularity towards the end of the nineteenth century, finds here its perfect leitmotif, and soon takes shape in broadly distributed mementos and souvenirs. The appearance of photography spread the distribution of these images even further, particularly through postcards. Between 1900 and the 1950s, this vision was transmitted on millions of occasions, thus establishing an imagery that, to a large extent, still persists today.
In this project, Axel Hütte investigates this process of the production, establishment and transmission of images, and of the construction of collective memory. To this end, he has selected around 300 postcards from anonymous photographers, which, as a group, summarise and expose this model. The result is an itinerary through the history of photographic representation, and of the impression that it manages to turn the familiar into the uncanny, and the uncanny into the familiar. At the same time, he will also present his own images of this territory in defence of the individuality of a vision of the world, and of the subject’s capacity to marvel before the world.
Axel Hütte (Essen, Germany, 1951) studied at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf under the guidance of the Beechers, and then continued his studies in London and Paris. He began to exhibit his work in the 80s. The main theme running through his work is the landscape, which he confronts by questioning the art tradition.
In our country, he has presented his work at the IVAM (Valencia), at the Fundación Telefónica (Madrid), and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía MNCARS, (Madrid).