Epicentro Art Collection Omar

Project Category

Photography

Date

2015

Artist

Stefan Heyne

Curator

Annika Hirsekorn

Project Details

The photographs of Stefan Heyne (born in 1965 in Brandenburg an der Havel) are emphatically nonrepresentational. The artist omits the elements that generally define a photograph, forgoing the use of any identifiable motif. Instead he creates abstract photographs honed to perfection by paring his imagery to a blurred play of light and shadow with no indication of form. In his most recent series of works, Heyne even avoids the use of soft-focus as an artistic device and emphasizes instead the high-definition reproduction of perhaps one of the purest motifs of all: the cloudless sky photographed from the window of an airplane. The color spectra of pure light revealed in these images seem blurry and out of focus, but they are not. Thus, Heyne’s latest photographs with their splendid sequences of utter dissolution of form and color represent his most radical abstraction to date. In his photographs the viewer is confronted with an endless depth of space to eternity.

Stefan Heyne is one of the most important proponents of a »new abstraction« in contemporary photography. His work is received as groundbreaking for a radical renewed examination of the photographic medium. Over the course of the past ten years he has left behind the conventions of photography to carve out a consistent new creative position. His mostly large-format pictures contain no interpretable subject, not even a contour. Extreme unfocusedness dissolves the motif to the point of complete openness of form, making his compositions aesthetic structures whose symbolic dimension merges an archaic past into the future.

Previously, Heyne’s photographs have been on display in several institutional solo exhibitions, among others at the Kunstmuseum Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus and at the Kunstsammlungen und Museen Augsburg in 2012. The Städtische Galerie Dresden was showing the most comprehensive exhibition so far in summer 2014 »NAKED LIGHT. Die Belichtung der Unendlichkeit«. Accompanying the exhibition already the second publication was published by Hatje Cantz. Heyne’s works are in numerous private and corporate collections, and increasingly in museums’ collections around the world.

by STEFAN HEYNE

ULTIMATE Photography

ultimate