Bernd Uhde

Bernd Uhde captures the scenery of the Formula 1 races in strong colors, which he puts together in his pastose, pictorially reworked photographs. Unusual perspectives and dynamic compositions lend Uhde’s images an expressive aesthetic gained from his experience with aerial photography. His images dissolve the boundary between painting and photography.
Horst Klöver


COME FLY WITH ME

As an introduction to his work, photographer Bernd Uhde quotes the romancer Marcel Proust: “The true journey to discovery does not consist of seeking for new landscapes but rather of seeing with different eyes.” Uhde, however, may however count as a discoverer of New Zealand, as he not only turns his refreshingly astute attention to the landscape as a whole but equally concentrates on the details that are related to his other passion: flying.

His photographs from the air clearly set themselves apart in one particular way. Here a painter’s eye is trained vertically upon the ground below, capturing structures that escape others. The expression of urbanness and the related mastery over the earth are not the only things that stimulate Uhde to make his pictures; fields that show the unity of man and nature also have a place in his work. These landscape structures seem complex but nevertheless orderly. His works simply reveal a natural sense of order and exemplify the concept of “earthliness” in the form most beautiful to the eye of the beholder.

The gaze that Uhde casts on the colored structures of strips of land is similar to that of his aerial photography and testifies to his ability to discover the grand in the small. In his clearly composed, glowing color prints, he summarizes finds such as signs coated with coarse patterns, skid marks that manifest a perhaps slightly adventurous landing, and linear systems for the “super signs” of flying. Several influences are at work here: the abstract expressionist painting and the New York School, the black-and-white photography of Aaron Siskind; however, in comparison with Uhde’s images from the air and his colorful abstracted pictures stories about how we fly, all the forerunners from earlier eras of fine arts seem particularly earthbound.

Horst Klöver