"The Bechers had a chainsaw in their car".

Düsseldorf – centre of photographic art

Ralf Brueck had a major solo exhibition in Ratingen, Andreas Gefeller got his own show at the NRW Forum, Anne Pöhlmann’s creations have graced the Japan Room at the Langen Foundation, while Martin Klimas’ work made it into the New York Times Magazine. We visited four successful Düsseldorf artists to discover the winning formula behind photographic art ‘made in Düsseldorf’.

It may be framed, but it still feels like we’re being tossed about by the wave, depriving us of any sense of orientation. What is up and what is down? This work by Ralf Brueck is simply entitled Wave. Another one, called Columbus Module ISS, is also iconographic, but in quite a different way, and it too grabs our attention immediately. But can we trust the perspective, or the title? Does this work from the artist’s Deconstruction series really show the research laboratory of the International Space Station, or rather its exact replica at the ESA in Cologne? Or has the real scene been digitally altered? “Look very closely,” suggests Ralf Brueck. After a brief but heavy rain shower, the autumn light, still intense, streams through the windows once again, drawing bright stripes on the floor of the Ratingen Museum, where his art is currently on display. The 63 featured exhibits include five video works.

Brueck is one of the younger exponents of the legendary Düsseldorf School of Photography. In his series, some of which consist of large format works, he examines architecture and urban spaces, but also landscapes and natural phenomena. Back in 1995, when he began his course at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie, or Academy of Arts, the photography class was still being taught by Bernd Becher, in tandem with his wife Hilla. Although she had no official position at the academy, the artist couple always worked together. From blast furnaces, water towers and winding towers to gasometers, grain silos and factory halls – Bernd and Hilla Becher’s serial black and white photographs constitute a life’s work that made them famous around the world, and which has stood the test of time. But not only that, the ‘Becher class’ also produced photographic artists such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff. In 2011, Gursky’s piece Rhein II was auctioned for around $4.3 million, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, until it was finally superseded in 2022 by a work by Man Ray.

In the same village as Gursky and Ruff

“I have a great affinity with Düsseldorf,” says Brueck. “It’s like a village, but with a cosmopolitan vibe. Many acclaimed artists live here.” They include Andreas Gursky as well as Thomas Ruff. Ralf Brueck studied under Ruff from the year 2000 and went on to become one of his star pupils. Brueck has travelled a lot, he likes New York and Los Angeles. Even so, a few years ago he left Düsseldorf’s vibrant city centre and moved to the tranquil suburb of Oberrath. But the reason soon becomes clear on our visit to his new domicile, on the bel étage of a grand early 20th century villa located at the edge of the forest. The architectural appeal of the beautiful arched windows and the frame and panel doors are immediately obvious, even to us. The decision to leave the city centre was not easy for Brueck, who was born in Düsseldorf in 1966, and whose parents ran a restaurant on Schwanenspiegel lake “with boat hire, long before the K21 became the K21”.

“No matter which part of Düsseldorf you go to,, you’ll always find an impressive number of artists who live there, from many different generations. The sheer depth of it is quite extraordinary,” says Anne Pöhlmann, who was born in 1978. She also studied under Thomas Ruff, from 2001, before switching to Rita McBride’s class. What drew her to Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie? “The academy was well known for being active, and it received a lot of attention,” says the artist, who originally hails from Dresden. She mentions the annual exchange. “One remarkable aspect during my course was that we had about ten guest students every semester. That also reflected the reality of the city, I was quite surprised at just how international it was. After all, it’s not as if Düsseldorf is all that large.”

Düsseldorf, the melting pot

Suddenly, Anne Pöhlmann’s closest friends were from South Korea and Belarus. Or from Japan, a country that also provided Pöhlmann with artistic inspiration. For her Japan Diary she used Japanese printing techniques to transfer her photographs onto silk. This was prompted by a residency in Kyoto. “I had already been considering the question of what constitutes an artistic medium and ever since then I’ve been using all sorts of different materials for printing my photos.” In the former imperial capital of Kyoto, a traditional textile centre, she also discovered vintage fabric at flea markets. That gave her the idea of incorporating other textiles into her work as well as printing photographs on silk. The results went on display at an installation in the Japan Room of the Langen Foundation in Neuss, where Anne Pöhlmann had a solo exhibition in 2019. “I find the interconnection of concept art and photography very interesting,” she explains.  

“In Düsseldorf there are an incredible number of photographic artists to compare notes with,” says Andreas Gefeller. The photographer welcomes us to his studio, a small, two-storey building in a courtyard on Hansaallee. Looking out, the view is of a southern catalpa tree. On the wall of the upper floor, where Gefeller works, are some of his most recent photographs. The series is called Dust, and it is still a work in progress. “I’m showing Dust at the Art Cologne first, and then at the NRW Forum next spring.” In 2023, the NRW Forum hosted a solo exhibition simply entitled ‘Andreas Gefeller’, showcasing 60 works covering the Düsseldorf artist’s entire creative output, from the year 2000 up to and including Dust.

Dust? Many of the images here in the studio are more reminiscent of astronomical photographs. “That’s actually ash that is being thrown up and scatters in the air. I photographed it at the waste incineration plant in Flingern,” explains Gefeller. “If you look more closely, you can spot glass and metal splinters, or bits of wire, sometimes even screws.” Sure enough, now we are able to make out small coloured dots, some looking like pixels. Gefeller has cranked up the colour contrast, “to make visible what is normally invisible.” This lifts the greyness of the ash, revealing some of its secrets.

Expanding the realm of experience

Whether it’s an early series like Soma, for which he photographed holiday resorts on Gran Canaria at night with long exposures, or a series like Flames, in which the eponymous subjects are more reminiscent of bones, fungi or embryos – with Gefeller the first glance can often be deceptive. By employing techniques such as long, short or overexposure, by collaging individual digital images or by choosing unusual perspectives, the photographic artist, who studied at the Folkwang University in Essen, is expanding the dimensions of our experience. As an artist who is represented by galleries in Cologne, London, Amsterdam and New York, does Gefeller still identify with Düsseldorf, his birthplace? “I don’t think of myself as part of a group, but the fact remains that wherever in the world I go, absolutely everyone knows the Düsseldorf School of Photography, and that is certainly not to my disadvantage.”

But why is it that Düsseldorf still remains a centre, possibly even the centre, of artistic photography, not least at international level, and almost half a century after the Bechers arrived at the Kunstakademie? While there are historical and artistic reasons, there are also more mundane, technical ones. “Düsseldorf has an excellent infrastructure. There are photo laboratories and workshops that represent a wealth of expertise you won’t find elsewhere,” says Martin Klimas. We meet him at his studio on Mintropstrasse. The courtyard of the building next door used to be home to Kraftwerk’s legendary Kling-Klang studio, while artists such as Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo and Thomas Schütte once worked in a studio building on nearby Harkortstrasse. “Grieger is one of those places, as is HSL,” Klimas adds. The two photo labs merged a couple of years ago. “And where else would you find a frame builder like Frank Terhardt with his four metre frames?”

Putting the craft into business

Ralf Brueck said much the same. “I’ve got all the workshops I need in Düsseldorf”, he told us. Indeed, Grieger’s customer list reads like a who’s who of artistic photography – ranging from Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth to Wolfgang Tillmans and Thomas Demand. The Grieger company was a pioneer of acrylic glass mounting. Since the 1970s, it has been principal licensee of the Diasec process. This ensures permanent smear-free and bubble-free bonding of photographic material with protective high-quality acrylic glass – all the way up to sizes of 5 by 2.4 metres. “Even the Bechers still worked in smaller picture formats and then assembled the individual images into their typologies. The fact that Grieger was in a position, technologically, to produce large formats represented a paradigm shift,” says Martin Klimas. “From then on, photography was able to compete with painting, which had previously had the monopoly on large-format pictures.”

So why did this paradigm shift happen in Düsseldorf, of all places? Klimas regards the role of the advertising and trade fair industries in the city as a driving force. Large formats are crucial for advertising media, of course. He himself has his own links to the advertising industry. When he studied at the HSD Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, one of his lecturers was Gerhard Vormwald, a well-known advertising and magazine photographer in the 1970s.

Today, the photographic artist is represented by the Cosar gallery in Flingern, as well as by a gallery in New York. In his studio, the first thing to catch our eye is a small, framed picture, the artwork for an album cover. ‘Miles At The Fillmore’, it says. Would that be Miles Davis? “After New York Times Magazine covered some of my ‘sonic sculptures’, I was approached by the art director of a record company.” Klimas’ colourful Sonic Sculptures are something of a synaesthetic experiment. The set-up is as follows: Klimas puts a canvas-covered stretcher frame on a loudspeaker, then he applies paint and turns up the volume. The vibrations of the speaker’s membrane cause the paint to move, fling it upwards and make it perform something akin to a choreographed dance. In the case of the artwork in front of us, the acoustic material was provided by the Miles Davis track Pharaoh’s Dance. High-speed photography then did the rest.

Klimas also uses that particular technique in some of his other series. How else would he be able to capture porcelain figures on camera as they smash onto the floor or photograph flower vases being hit by projectiles at the moment of impact? We look at the prints on the walls and marvel at the aesthetics of disintegration. Does Klimas see any links between his own studio photography – which uses photoelectric sensors and high-pressure projectile devices – and the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, which was striving for objectivity? “Even the Bechers kept a chainsaw in their car and removed anything that got in the way of their work. They also had an assistant with an old fire engine and a long ladder,” Klimas grins.

Where Beuys and Warhol met

Photographic art doesn’t happen in a vacuum, of course. But it finds particularly fertile ground in Düsseldorf. And that’s not just with regard to the many high-calibre museums and the wealth of art and cultural institutions with their funding programmes. “The corner house that I walk past every day here on Luegplatz square was immortalised by Andy Warhol in a picture entitled ,Oberkassel. He knew the area from his visits to Joseph Beuys,” says Anne Pöhlmann. Her studio is in Wuppertal, but she lives in Oberkassel. She reckons that in Düsseldorf art is everywhere, and suggests that perhaps it suits some artists that they’re able to fly under the radar here to some extent. She says that Düsseldorf is relaxed while at the same time taking great pride in its artistic heritage, citing the many cross-generational circles of friends that exist here as further proof of that. Another defining characteristic of the city for her are its many artist-run spaces, including ‘the pool’ in Golzheim or a number of places on Flingern’s Birkenstrasse, like ‘Nails’, ‘sonneundsolche’, ‘Baustelle Schaustelle’ and ‘Da in die Front’. “Even as students we staged exhibition in off-spaces.” Anne Pöhlmann also likes art events such as the DC Open, i.e. the Düsseldorf Cologne Open Galleries. Clages, the gallery that represents her art, is based in Cologne. The artist has previously taken part in the ‘strike a pose’festival, which promotes the cross-fertilisation of art and fashion. “It’s the kind of event that will attract people who wouldn’t normally visit a gallery or a museum.”

Besides his love for K21, Ralf Brueck also stresses the importance of the Stoschek, Philara and Kai10 collections. We, on the other hand, are surprised to see who owns the works that make up his exhibition at Ratingen Museum. The list includes Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Walid El Sheikh. But then, of course, there are works by Brueck on the walls of El Sheikh’s bar Sir Walter in Düsseldorf’s old quarter, most notably his large-format picture Wirtschaftswunder. Brueck took the photo for this particular image in the foyer of Düsseldorf’s Dreischeibenhaus, an icon of resurgent post-war Germany. The connection between art and club and bar culture does have a long tradition in Düsseldorf. Just think of Creamcheese or the Ratinger Hof. Ralf Brueck nods. “If the concept is right, the two can definitely feed off each other.”

• ‘Andreas Gefeller’ ran from 3 March to 14 May 2023 at the NRW Forum.

Report by Ilona Marx and Sebastian Wolf (photos).

This article is supported by REACT-EU.

Images: Düsseldorf Tourism