Events/Openings

THREE WORK GROUPS BY ULRICH WÜST
Ulrich Wüst

The exhibition Transitions presents three work groups by Ulrich Wüst that narrate history. A cool observer of his time with a contentious relationship to social and political contradictions, Wüst shoots his photographs in Berlin, Magdeburg, and Cologne – three cities heavily marked by the destruction of the Second World War. His analytic, purist photographs of urban space, city structures, and architecture narrate and comment upon a significant chapter of German history in the throes of massive change.

In 1994, as part of a Bewag-sponsored art project, Kaspar König commissioned the series Mitte (Berlin 1995–1997). Restricting himself to the borough of Berlin-Mitte, Wüst photographed the demolition and construction of a city in the process of reinventing itself. In Morgenstrasse (Magdeburg 1998–2000), he presents an unadulterated view of the industrial city of Magdeburg, which was left to decay, while his series Fremdes Pflaster (Foreign Streets, Cologne 2004–2005) shows a city caught between tradition and reconstruction during the time of the post-war West German ‘economic miracle’.

One of the unique features of Wüst’s photographs is their dialectic between an ostensible objectivity and an attention to detail that is both subjective and subversive.