Landscapes in a dialogue between painting and photography. At first
glance, Stephan Kaluza's (b. 1964, Bad Iburg; lives and works in
Duesseldorf) photorealist paintings might be still lifes, portraits of
pristine nature. Yet they actually show battlefields and other scenes of
past horrors. The idyll in his pictures positively appeals to our
vigilance to resist the impression of profound peace. The same ambiguity
lies at the heart of the photographs of Dieter Nuhr (b. 1960, Wesel;
lives and works in Ratingen). Nuhr, who is also widely known as a
comedian, has contributed pictures that are carefully focused renditions
of seemingly serendipitous discoveries from his travels in Nepal,
Bolivia, India, and Sudan. In their timelessness, Nuhr's photographs are
akin to the locales in Kaluza's works, which, disburdened of the heavy
weight of their histories, reemerge as straightforward natural
landscapes. The lavishly illustrated two-volume edition presents the
fruits of a collaboration between two artists united by their shared
preoccupation with the dialectic of ephemerality and permanence.