Galeria Leme presents ’’Nowhere is a Place“, the second solo exhibition of German artist Frank Thiel.

The exhibition's title is taken from a book co-written by Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux in 1992 based on their impressions of Patagonia.

Thiel experienced the timeless and raw beauty of one of the purest, oldest and most unique landscapes on earth 15 years ago for the first time. In 2011 and 2012 he returned to Patagonia for several visits to create this new body of work and turned his camera on the massive glacial ice formations in the Parque National Los Glaciares in Argentine, Patagonia, which is part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the third largest ice cap in the world. The resulting images are a haunting meditation on the majesty and resilience, as well as the fragility and endangerment, of these frozen, sublime, natural edifices. Seemingly endless variations of blues, greys, charcoals and white. Highly textured surfaces with densely packed details, alluring and ominous at the same time. Almost supernatural looking shapes, peaks, cliffs and structures of ice, that are thousands of years old and far more ancient than any human construction. Infinite timelines and striations engraved in majestic ice walls soaring hundreds of feet above the Lago Argentino and it’s surrounding mountains and valleys.

In inspecting this organic architecture with his eye for detail and composition, with an almost archeological focus and a painterly sense of abstraction and color Thiel spreads his 20 years lasting engagement with themes of temporality, decay and transformation found in Berlin’s rapidly changing post-unification urban topography over the more plodding pace of prehistory.

Frank Thiel (Kleinmanchnow, Germany, 1966) lives in Berlin.

Thiel’s work is in the collections of major international museums, including: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., USA; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany; Museum Moderner Kunst | Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, USA; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA.

In addition to the 48th Biennale in Venice, Italy and the 14th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, Thiel has been included in exhibitions at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Portland Art Museum, USA; Austin Museum of Art, USA; Phoenix Art Museum, USA; Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA; Museo Nacional de Bella Artes, Havana, Cuba; Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; Centre National de la Photographie Paris, France; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; and the Museo Jacobo Borges in Caracas, Venezuela, among others.

In Brazil his works have been shown at the XXV. Bienal de São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; SESC Paulista, São Paulo; the IV. Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, Porto Alegre; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasília; Centro Cultural Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro; SESC Pompéia, São Paulo; and the Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz, Ribeirão Preto.