Simone Nieweg – Pflanzungen, Schuppen, Ackerland. & August Kotzsch – Natur, Landschaft, Genre.

In the page's words:

Three parallel exhibitions will be on view at the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur starting in September. The photographs by Simone Nieweg and August Kotzsch show landscaped areas and the designs and gems of nature discovered therein. An exciting encounter between contemporary and historical photography. Contemporary portraits and still lifes are presented by Sora Park, 2022 August Sander Award winner.

For Simone Nieweg (*1962), master student of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the view into nature and the areas made usable by man has been the starting point of her artistic work since the 1980s. Even then, pressing questions about how to deal with our natural resources were in the background. With her color photographs, which she takes in the Rhineland, in several regions of Germany and in France with the large-format camera, she draws attention to the often overlooked peripheral areas of our towns and industrial areas and shows what aesthetics emerge when these still unplanned places are used in a limited way, usually on one's own initiative, for gardening or agriculture. The artist captures what gives structure and continuity to the land: alternative allotments, grazing land, pieces of meadow, fields turning into wild growth, vegetable beds, plowed fields in winter or blossoming fruit trees as harbingers of spring. Buildings erected with simple means, be they sheds or compost racks, can also be discovered as typical elements of their landscapes.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of the same name published by Schirmer / Mosel Verlag.

August Kotzsch (1836-1910) is one of the early masters of German photography and offers a historical counterpart to Simone Nieweg. He takes us on a ramble through the nature of his home region Loschwitz near Dresden. Landscape details, garden corners, still lifes, the fruits of his own harvest, but also houses and farms became his motifs. Little gems, which with great attention to detail draw a realistic as well as romantic picture of his surroundings. Kotzsch, a self-taught photographer and son of a winegrower, used a complicated process to produce his photographs. He made his negatives using the collodion wet plate process, and his prints on albumen paper. In this respect, his views are characterized by delightfully iridescent sepia tones.

The works on loan come from the estate of August Kotzsch in cooperation with KICKEN BERLIN, along with exhibits from the museum's own collection.

For the series "Bei mir, bei Dir" Sora Park (*1991 Gimpo, South Korea) received the third August Sander Award in 2022. In addition to a representative selection from the award-winning series, photographic still lifes are on view in the exhibition: Profane objects and materials that the artist knows how to bring forth as imaginative objects.

"Bei mir, bei Dir" shows young women and men from the student and private environment of Sora Park, who has been studying at the University Folkwang in Essen since 2017. The results are predominantly individual portraits, taken either in her own apartment or in that of the sitter. With her analog large-format camera, she always takes only one exposure, which further enhances the intensity of the balanced compositions of the pictorial works. In the series, Sora Park introduces a young generation of the artistic-creative milieu like a crucial phase of life in finding identity.

In November there will be a change of exhibition. The presentation of Sora Park will be followed by the show "Das Becherhaus in Mudersbach" photographs by Laurenz Berges.