On the occasion of the 250th birthday of Alexander von Humboldt, Daniel Marzona is presenting the exhibition „Kosmos Tropical (Tropical Cosmos)“ by Axel Hütte. Since the mid-1990s, Hütte has traveled the world, primarily photographing landscapes and architecture. His works exhibit less of an interest in the exact representation of reality, but seek to compress the appearence thereof into something that can be read as almost painterly.

Moving beyond the documentary and narrative, Hütte attempts to capture his own subjective impressions of natural spaces and cityscapes, irritating the viewers‘ gaze and denying a clear legibility of pictorial space. With plate camera in hand, Hütte has, over the past 30 years, created photographic representations of landscapes on every continent.

In this sense, Hütte’s view of the world seems kindred to that of Alexander von Humboldt. It is the sober, curious, and repeatedly astonished gaze of a friend whose observations take the tiniest details into consideration without ever losing sight of the larger structure within which they are found. Only this type of gaze can envision the world as an appearance that creates reality while at the same time existing as a projection of our own imagination.

Hütte (*1951, Essen) currently lives in Düsseldorf and Berlin. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Bernd Becher. A recipient of the Hermann Claasen Prize, his work has been shown extensively in gallery and museum exhibitions around the world. As part of major permanent collections in Germany and abroad, Hütte’s works are frequently exhibited internationally, most recently in solo retrospectives at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle Krems and Museum Franz Gertsch.