Hütte – Reflexio

Oberschwaben (Upper Swabia), between the Black Forest, Lake Constance and the Allgäu, offers a richness of Baroque architecture and picturesque rolling landscapes. Axel Hütte’s images are not intended as portrayals of a cultural landscape and its history. They are photographic images, but not necessarily photographically realistic images. They are, collectively, titled Reflexio. Hütte works with the inversion of the colour spectrum, the reflection of the pictorial space. The photographer’s interventions in the realistic image are a radical transformation of what the eye initially registered, they contradict experience; negate customary perception. Instead, they are an autonomous aesthetic construct and reveal a different side of reality. The two themes in these works—“Baroque” and “landscape”—thus become equivalent tools for thoroughly investigating pictorial realities.

AXEL HÜTTE (*1951, Essen) studied photography in Düsseldorf Art Academy in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s class, and is considered one of main representatives of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. His images take on a painterly quality as strives to make the world experienceable as real and at the same time as imagination. His works are part of the world’s most important photo collections. Hütte lives and works in Düsseldorf.