BERLIN.- Wagner + Partner announce the fifth solo exhibition of the German photo artist Thomas Wrede. The Luminous Screen is both the exhibition’s title and that of a large-format landscape photograph from his well-known series, Real Landscape. This photograph also illuminates his artistic approach, because for Wrede, photographs are always images about images. On the one hand they clarify the relationship of contemporary media with its subject matter and on the other they elucidate moments of perception, such as longing or memories. In The Luminous Screen an empty, brightly lit, drive-in movie screen is situated in the midst of a night mountainscape. Although the photograph is composed from miniature models, it suggests a plausible reality. More than this, it initiates associations and memories of countless films and photographs and consequently represents a quasi projection surface for our inner worlds.

The exhibition situates new works from Real Landscapes with older works from the Wrapped Landscapes series. For the latter, Wrede pursued an opposing approach: Instead of a mise-en scène with the help of models, he photographed model-kit trees and grasses in close-up as ‘found objects’ through their original wrapping and enlarged them to such an extent that the comical plants appear like prehistoric giants. Without the helpful visual references, the inversion of size allows the viewer to perceive these photographs unconventionally, as well as to interpret them. Both series appropriate and challenge our notions of perception and invite an inspiring dialogue around “image production”.

Thomas Wrede was born in 1963 in Iserlohn and studied in Münster and Berlin. Since 2015 he has been Professor for Photography and Media at the University of Fine Arts Essen. Wrede’s position as a celebrated, German, middle-aged generation photo artist is confirmed by countless national and international institutional exhibitions. The upcoming solo exhibition, Modell-Landschaft (Model-Landscape) in Museum Sinclair-Haus of the Altana Cultural Foundation, Bad Homburg will be an extensive survey of the last 20 years of Wrede’s work.

Collections: National Art Collection Berlin, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, LWL-Museum Münster, Hudson Bay Company New York, The West Collection Philadelphia, Hall Art Collection New York, HBC Global Art Collection New York, ING-Collection Amsterdam, Kunst-am-Bau Berlin (federally funded public art projects in Berlin), UBS and DZ-Bank.