Emotion and Document

Kai-Uwe Schulte-Bunert works in extremely precise series that, beyond their peculiar aesthetics, have one thing in common: the memory of places.

The impression that these series convey is a kind of abandonment, as if the objects, the houses and places, have forgotten the reasons for their existence. There are well-known, familiar things which we discover in these photographs. And nevertheless, although we've never, and at the same time always seen them, they operate/work in their static and function-free existence as alien, empty.

In the continuous revelation of unsaid and unconsciousness lies the most intimate aspect of the work of the artist. This almost private cipher can be found in the works about apparently or actually abandoned places, which are always perceived in a moment of waiting. These places are part of his childhood, such as the villages of his Vaterland, or the building-sites of Passaggi, the border cities of 2_geteilte orte, Rimini or the landscapes of Fondo Vivo.

These are places where the relationship between constructed/added elements and their context is perfectly calibrated but at the same time interrupted by almost surreal details. When time leaves behind its traces on things, Schulte-Bunert reads them with a special sensitivity and stresses the memory of the places with an almost monochromatic photographic representation of great aesthetic effect.

In a dual approach - on the one hand, with a picture composition of an intuition based aesthetic, and on the other with a particularly delicate chromatic work - one grasps the intention Schulte-Bunerts to transfer the patina of time in a visual representation that is able to find the beauty of the places, even when it should remain unopened to the ordinary observer.

The passing of time - the photographer seems to say - makes any tension softer, although the signs of time flowing remain visible and are respected. Schulte-Bunerts work, in which intuition and consciousness, emotion and documentation are united, based on a deep analysis of the relationship between the object and its representation.

In the exhibition "Übersehen" (a word game, with the double meaning of "On Seeing" and "Overlooked") one finds an analytical view on the way of working of Kai-Uwe Schulte-Bunert through examples from various series, from Specie di Spazio, a work in which the tension between normality in content and aesthetic emphasis is particularly evident, right up to recent landscape photographs.