PHOTO:Axel Hütte

Axel Hütte was born in 1951 at Essen (Germany) is an artist known for his landscape photography. Between 1973 and 1981, he studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he attended Bernd Becher’s fine art course in photography. Axel Hütte lives and works in Dusseldorf and Berlin. Together with Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff (with whom he shared a studio space in a disused power station) Hütte belongs to a generation of post-war German photographers who, through the influence of Bernd and Hilla Becher, have resurrected the city as a key subject of art photography. Other important subjects include jungles and mountains, as well as classical scenes. Conscious of the nineteenth-century German tradition of romantic landscape painting, Hütte inevitably introduces affect into otherwise clinically composed photographs. In 1982 Hütte won a DAAD scholarship to London. His first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf in 1984. Solo exhibitions followed at the Rotterdamse Kunststichting, Rotterdam(1989), the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (1993) the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn (1995), the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur (1997), and the Foundation for photography, Amsterdam (2001). Most recently a major retrospective of Hütte’s work was held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in 2004. His latest group exhibition is ‘’Landscape in my mind’’ (2015). A further focus of the exhibition is on the landscape as an experiential space documented with the camera. Photographers such as the land-art artist Hamish Fulton or the former Becher pupil Axel Hütte see themselves here as wanderers and travellers through the world. Far-flung panoramas and dense primeval-forest situations unfold before our eyes. Photography has long ceased to be simply an objective medium reproducing reality, but in the digital age has become a means of alienation and manipulation.

Info: Curating: Florian Steininger, Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, Freyung 8, Vienna, Duration: 11/2-26/4/15, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00, Fri: 10:00-21:00, www.kunstforumwien.at/en