COPENHAGEN.- Danish artist Ebbe Stub Wittrup takes over Gammel Holtegaard with the largest exhibition of his photographic works to date. Stub Wittrup’s works focus on phenomena that cannot actually be photographed, questioning what we think we see and reminding us that there is more to life than we can register, understand and explain.

At first glance Ebbe Stub Wittrup’s photographic works are sharp and highly aesthetic. Echoing documentary photography, they depict something we can see with the naked eye – ‘devil’s bridges’ in Southern Europe, a grasshopper on a blade of grass, or the branches of a pine swaying in the wind. But there is more to his images than meets the eye.

In the series Devil’s Bridges (2009-2016), for example, the artist photographs 16 of these bridges in mountainous Southern Europe. Medieval arched stone structures, these beautiful, alluring bridges suspended above rivers and ravines are depicted in a series of apparently objective images. The actual subject of the series, however, is not the monumental bridges themselves, but their supernatural and mystical qualities. The bridges are so complex and difficult to construct that their existence has been explained by myths about the devil helping to build them.

Ebbe Stub Wittrup’s approach to photography is conceptual. As well as being aesthetic and alluring, his images express ideas, associations and carefully selected photographic techniques. The artist connects these elements to create series of works that can all be experienced as nascent narratives.

In the exhibition Photographs at Gammel Holtegaard, Ebbe Stub Wittrup investigates the relationship between photography, illusion and reality against the historical backdrop of the manor’s galleries. The artist’s powerful, conceptual works evoke the spirit of the space and the baroque’s penchant for dramatical staging, sensuousness, and conjuring tricks.

Ebbe Stub Wittrup lives and works in Copenhagen. Photography is central to his practice, but he also works in other media, including film, sculpture and installation art. Stub Wittrup graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1999, and has since exhibited widely nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig (DE), Kunsthalle Sâo Paulo (BR), ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (DK), Kirchner Museum (CH) and Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art (DK). His works are in international collections that include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (US), Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation (AT), Collection Munich-RE (DE), the Statoil Art Collection (NO) and Art Foundation Mallorca (ES). I Denmark Stub Wittrup is represented in major collections that include the National Gallery of Denmark, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, the New Carlsberg Foundation, the Nykredit Foundation, the National Museum of Photography, and the Danish Arts Foundation. In 2010 the artist was awarded the Danish Art Foundation’s three-year working grant. From 2013-2019 he was also a lecturer in media art at the Jutland Art Academy in Aarhus, Denmark.