Axel Hütte – Theorea

Axel Hütte, born in Essen in 1951, has vision as his theme. His large-format photographs of landscapes, urban landscapes, his underground, tunnel and night photographs, mountain and fog photographs – taken in London, Berlin, Hamburg, Italy, Greece and in the Swiss and French Alps – are aimed less at the photographed object, and more at opening up a pictorial space and thus making possible visual experience.

Whether we, as viewer, are standing on a small cliff, and in front of us are rising unchanging and unfathomable fog banks, whether we are standing on a rise – as Petrarca once did, like the desire for control and colonization of the 19th century – looking into the country, whether the view follows the flatland and rises through the mist into the eternal, whether we are looking towards the wall of a glacier, into the deepest night or through a tunnel. Axel Hütte purifies and purges the scenes until they become examples of different standpoints, normal and special experiences of space, of open, soft, sharp, directed and blocked vision. His works, and especially his newest images, are an exploration of vision, an experience of being – in exceptional, tangible photographic colour space.

The exhibition was curated by Urs Stahel.