Night and Day

The comprehensive exhibition of the Düsseldorf-based photographer, who to this day travels to all continents for his fascinating photographs, impressively reflects his interest in the perception of the picture, of representation and reality. Axel Hütte’s photographs surprise us with pictorial structures that place his work beyond the documentary. With water reflections, the dark of the night, but also with vertical or horizontal elements of architecture he composes atmospheric pictorial worlds. Making use of the blurring created by wafts of fog, and of structures found in bridge architecture, he creates both perspectival and atmospheric landscape pictures.

Hütte’s photographs are characterised by a profound stillness, by an overwhelming sense of loneliness. The process of creating his pictures, which he takes using a plate camera, usually makes considerable demands on his patience. In photographs from the African desert, the Antarctic Sea, or in his nocturnal pictures of metropolises – Axel Hütte shows moments of astonishment and contemplation, inviting the visitor to take a closer look.

The exhibition brings together around 70 large-scale day and night pictures dating from a period of over twenty years, including some that have never been presented publicly before. A simultaneous exhibition at the Museum Quadrat, Bottrop, shows the early oeuvre of Axel Hütte, thus broadening the perspective on his artistic work.