Axel Htte. Reflexio

Inverted Baroque, Mirrored Landscapes
Oberschwaben (Upper Swabia), between the Black Forest, Lake Constance and the Allgau, offers a richness of Baroque architecture and picturesque rolling landscapes. Axel Hutte'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. Hutte 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 HUTTE (*1951, Essen) studied photography in Dusseldorf Art Academy in Bernd and Hilla Becher's class, and is considered one of main representatives of the Dusseldorf 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. Hutte lives and works in Dusseldorf.