Joachim Richau

Immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989, Joachim Richau began making regular work stays in Scandinavia. After, in the mid-1990s, he increasingly delved into the landscape and its inherent structure, from 2000 onwards he focused exclusively on this theme for his photographic series and individual images. For more than ten years, Richau had access to a studio in the forest house of friends in Dalarna / Sweden, but nevertheless far away from human inhabitation, to where he retreated for several months each year – also in winter. Included in the group of works titled FRAGMENT oder die Gegenwart des Zweifels (FRAGMENT or the Presence of Doubt) are photos for which the artist repeatedly visited the same stone quarry. Of central importance to these most recent works is the duality between the nearly opaque surface of a multi-layered blanket of snow and the underlying red-brown rock. Nevertheless, the goal here is not the documentation of concrete locations. Instead, the extreme close-ups of ice surfaces or walls of stone reach a level of abstraction which remove the respective motif from any temporal and spatial context.