Michael Kirch

The Origin of Light

July 6, 2017 – September 10, 2017

L`horizon vertical, 2011, Harman Fine Art auf Dibond unter Diasec, 100 x 80 cm

The star photographer Michel Kirch , who is in demand worldwide, is presenting a selection of his award-winning works in Germany for the first time in the GALERIE MESSMER!

Since January 2017, the long list of his international awards has also included the coveted award for “Best Monochrome Photographer of the Year”. In March 2017 he won the “32. Chelsea International Fine Art Competition (Manhattan)” and is a winner of the “Creative Quarterly 2017 (Fine Art Professional)” award. The list could go on.

The artist, born in Metz/France in 1959, creates impressive works, some of them monumental in size, which move beyond the conventional criteria of aesthetic evaluation. The haunting, almost disturbingly intense photographs immediately cast a spell over the viewer and unleash a veritable flood of emotions.

The artist’s main interest is not in the documentation of real existing landscapes. He experiments with the subjective effect that his “inner landscapes, the geographies of the soul” trigger in the viewer.

The greatest and most exciting challenge for Kirch is the construction of a fiction from the building blocks and materials of reality – which he succeeds really masterly! He creates poetry from interwoven visual image elements that appear surreal rather than unreal due to the alienation of reality.

Kirch composes and constructs cryptic landscapes and sometimes apocalyptic urban scenarios, which he puts together from various of his individual shots. He is always in search of his “own version of reality”, a dream-like, almost mystical place, hidden under the surface of the visible and tangible.

He creates fantastic worlds full of light and shadow on the border between reality and fiction, in which the often undressed human figures wander around like scattered extras or seem to merge with the detailed picture ground.

Despite the restrained monochrome, Kirch’s works do not appear gloomy, but radiate great calm and an unmistakable aesthetic. And the artist’s haunting message that “the one, absolute and universally valid reality” no longer exists in our world of digitization and networking.

Information on the artist: www.michelkirch.com

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