Florian Maier-Aichen

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Selected works by Florian Maier-Aichen

Florian Maier-Aichen
Untitled

2005

c-print

183 x 229.8 cm
Florian Maier-Aichen’s images reinterpret landscape photography for the 21st century. Often shot at obscure angles or from aerial views, his estranged vantage points are both alien and familiar; a sensation enhanced by his subtle manipulation of the images. Conceiving the representation of sites with a sense of dislocation, Maier-Aichen’s work addresses issues of globalisation and virtual perception. In Untitled, Maier-Aichen’s coastline is far from postcard perfect: a virgin beach lined with superhighway and luxury homes expanding into the misty distance. Tinting the surrounding forest in an unnatural shade of red, he casts an apocalyptic glow over the seascape, framing wilderness and human intervention as a scene of science fiction portent.
Untitled
Florian Maier-Aichen
Untitled

2005

c-print

121.9 x 153.7 cm
Supplanting the expanses of classical vistas with futuristic tableaux, Florian Maier-Aichen recontextualises the romantic sublime to reflect modern day experience. Using a combination of traditional photographic techniques and computer imaging, Maier-Aichen slightly alters each image to heighten the tension within vast contemplative space. Maier-Aichen’s Untitled takes as its theme the American wilderness as conceived through 19th century painting. Through his lens, the unharnessed frontier with its associated promise and divine inspiration is transformed with unnerving effect. Impossible lighting conditions, too-manicured composition, and strange mushroom clouds give the landscape an aura of eerie expectancy.
Untitled
Florian Maier-Aichen
Untitled

2005

c-print

183.5 x 241.3 cm
Untitled
Florian Maier-Aichen
Untitled

2005

c-print

181 x 232.4 cm
Subverting the expected documentary quality of photography, Florian Maier-Aichen approaches his medium as a form of painterly illusion. Adopting his process as a means to ‘draw with light’, his photos blur fact and fiction, creating ominous evidence of a rapidly changing planet. Barren of conspicuous landmarks Maier-Aichen’s Untitled is an anonymous anywhere space. The receding grid pattern of lights weighs the composition with a dulled sleepiness, as the horizon seems to encroach in an electric blue haze. Shot from an extreme angle, Maier-Aichen’s landscape verges on the abstract; the unnatural phenomenon reading as subtle shifts of colour and texture, replicating the sublime intensity of colour-field painting.
Untitled
Florian Maier-Aichen
Untitled

2005

c-print

62.2 x 73.7 cm
Combining analogue photography with digital editing techniques, Florian Aichen-Maier revives an intrigue of technology and metaphysics; the effects of his process reveal ‘unseen truths’ or a sense of mysticism about his represented images. In Untitled, Maier-Aichen’s snow-scape exudes an eerie loneliness, encapsulating the deafening stillness of a winter’s night in its cool blue tint and greeting card romanticism. The unlikely presence of a street lamp amidst the trees gives strange illumination to the falling snow, giving an unsettling suburban presence to the desolate scene.
Above June Lake
Florian Maier-Aichen
Above June Lake

2005

c-print

218.4 x 184.2 cm
In Above June Lake, Florian Maier-Aichen presents an aerial view of the popular California tourist destination. Trading on the area’s celebrated 5 million year old geological heritage, Maier-Aichen’s photograph transforms the topography into something strangely primitive. Pin point trees, smooth glaciers, and contoured rock connote a biological animation, carved through with vein-like roads, and infectious microscopic houses. Scrutinised with alien perspective, evidence of development and luxury become etched upon the terrain as crude scratchings as the artificial white outline of ski-slopes attain the brutal elegance of cave painting.
Untitled
Florian Maier-Aichen
Untitled

2005

c-print

228.6 x 182.9 cm
In Untitled, Maier-Aichen’s image compels with an aberrant surrealism through its bizarre perspective and intense hues. In a scene more reminiscent of science fiction invention than natural phenomenon, distant mountains give way to an expansive plateau which suddenly drops off into an engulfing tree covered gorge; a cluster of tiny structures balancing precariously on its edge. Exaggerating the sky’s vivid blue canopy and bathing the vegetation in a mephitic red, Maier-Aichen’s otherworldly terrain manipulates the photographic ‘real’ into a language more indicative of painting, invoking the sublimity of Abstract Expressionism in his boding terrain.
Untitled (Long Beach)
Florian Maier-Aichen
Untitled (Long Beach)

2004

c-print

181.6 x 235 cm
Florian Maier-Aichen’s work appropriates the genre of landscape photography to reconsider its associations with environment, documentation, and exoticism. Using the malleability of photographic editing, Maier-Aichen’s Untitled (Long Beach) transforms a familiar view of metropolitan America into an apocalyptic wasteland. Printed in black and white, urban sprawl appears as ashy barrens, receding to foreboding ice mountains superimposed in the distance. Rendering sky and sea as empty voids, Maier-Aichen’s vision of unfolds as futuristic desert.

Articles

Blum & Poe is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by German born artist Florian Maier-Aichen.


This will mark Maier-Aichen's third solo exhibit with Blum & Poe.
This exhibition will feature ten large and small-scale photographs, continuing Maier-Aichen's challenge to established notions of landscape photography. The works employ techniques utilized throughout the history of photography, some of which have been digitally altered either in color, size, or a juxtaposition of imagery.

The sceneries range from a sprawling sunny California coast lined with crimson treetops taken with infra-red film, to an aerial view of bicyclists racing through hills in the Tour de France, to a black and white seascape with an illusory appearance of a painting that is an albumen print, a practice almost no longer used in photography.
While beautifying and idealizing the subject matter, his digital interventions ultimately highlight the theme of reality versus a simulation of reality. Maier-Aichen invites the viewers to contemplate our perception of what is real and what we believe to be real.

The more one examines his work, the more the photos surpass the initial aesthetic appeal to reveal a memory of what may never have been. Maier-Aichen creates a world where fact and fiction exist together and constructs a reality that makes us question what is right before our eyes.

Read the entire article here
Source: blumandpoe.com