Paperback with French flaps. Text is in German and English. Minor edge-wear and several light scores and bumps on covers. Spine is bumped and creased. One or two brown liquid stains on face of page block. Light sunning on pages. Contents are clear. AF
The ALBERTINA Museum is devoting a comprehensive solo presentation to the works of photographer Manfred Willmann (*1952). In his series, Willmann captures scenes from his personal surroundings in Graz and southern Styria, scenes that break with clichés of idyllic rural life. His pictures reveal a very direct and subjective view characterized by his consistent use of the flash and focus on details. Willmann is also one of the first Austrian photographers who used color as a means of artistic expression. The ALBERTINA Museum is showing six large series from Manfred Willmann?s oeuvre, including the influential work groups Schwarz und Gold and Das Land.00Exhibition: Albertina, Wien, Austria (08.02. - 26.05.2019).
With Blitz und Enzianblau, Manfred Willmann presents his third profound artist book – following Schwarz and Gold (Graz 1981) and Das Land (Salzburg 2000), composed of works from the year 2005. Intense close-up views, series of landscapes, animals, plants, everyday objects and portraits are interrupted by reproductions of the backside of the Agfa photo paper Sensatis. Having produced more than a thousand analog prints in the year 2005 on this material, Willmann has only looked at them ten years later and subsequently developed the present book. Blitz und Enzianblau brings together photographs that show not only the surface of the world, but also tell about of the medium of photography itself - of its very own possibilities to represent the world, in its beauty, ugliness and transience, as images. In the way as concrete poetry speaks about language itself, Willmann exposes the texture of the medium of photography. His photographs deal with constellations, still-lives, and moments – isolated by his flash, often painful in their existential depth, but entirely free of sentimentality.