Axel Hütte. Flowers and Rooms

From 4th May to 15th July, 2023

Helga de Alvear Gallery

Fourquet, 12. Madrid. Spain

Helga de Alvear

The Helga de Alvear gallery is showing the recent work by Axel Hütte, one of the most renowned photographers on the international art scene. His work is part of a tradition of German photographers who are direct heirs to the conceptual aesthetic and the teachings of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who readapted the original New Objectivity project in the 1980s to adopt a singular way of confronting the world.

One of Hütte’s most recent series of pictures shows flowers: wilted cut flowers that seem to willfully grow from the lower edge into the picture as a still life. All of the photographs in this series were taken in specific lighting conditions in Hütte’s studio and then brought into their finished form by means of a relatively simple pictorial manipulation, namely by reversing all the colors. Against a matte black background—printed either on aluminum or on large-format sheets of paper—the plants tower into the viewer’s field of vision in a strange way, glowing from within, while the original shadows seem to follow them like ghostly veils of light. 

A similar approach obscures a group of images depicting baroque interiors. Without any perspective distortions, the images depict their subjects in a frontal and central view. These otherwise “classic” photographic representations of architecture then undergo a complete destabilization of the viewers’ expectations by the reversal of all color values.

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