Events/Openings

DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM is pleased to present the first solo show featuring uncommissioned works by the Berlin-based photographer Andreas Mühe. Mühe’s oeuvre—the artist works exclusively in analogue photography—includes portraits, interiors, and landscapes. Many motifs in the various genres attest to his critical engagement of the aesthetic representations of political power. That is especially true of the pictures in this exhibition: Mühe shows seven photographs from the series “Obersalzberg,” shots whose picturesque setting has been charged with ideological overtones ever since it served Hitler as a vacation home and second seat of government. Mühe also stages Nazi propaganda materials designed for the indoctrination of children: he transposes enlarged photographs of 1930s and 1940s toy figurines into the installation by printing them on Rhenish-format newsprint, cutting them into fragments, and papering the walls in one of the gallery rooms with them.

The six small-format photographs in the exhibition—the dimensions match the size of the original negatives produced by Mühe’s large-format camera—seem at first glance to present sublime Alpine panoramas and romantic forest scenes with captivating technical perfection. At a second glance, the composition and careful use of light guide the eye to men in uniform that are almost lost amid the nature. It takes even closer inspection to recognize that they are Nazis and, as their poses reveal, were emptying their bladders at the moment the pictures were taken. Mühe stages the ‘pissing Nazis’ as a nuisance in the idyllic landscape: they ignorantly pollute a pristine natural setting. Even now they refuse to enable a reinterpretation of the countryside near Berchtesgaden, symbolically holding on to it by brazenly marking it as their territory.