Axel Hütte: Chronostasis

Axel Hütte was born in Essen, near Düsseldorf, in 1951 and studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1973 to 1980 on photography, at the class of Bernd and Hilla Becher. He belongs to the core of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. He is one of Becher’s students, alongside Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. They have had a lasting influence on the concept and reputation of photography as an art form since the early 1980s.

Like most of his fellow students, Axel Hütte began with interior architecture photographs in the subject-oriented style, then focused on urban themes, such as underground stations in Berlin. He took photos of both individual buildings and of building complexes. Architecture has emerged as the driving theme of his development as an artist, and it still remains in all its all-possible ways in the foreground in his works.

Hütte's photographs show what is possible when contemporary art meets evidence of great cultures. Today, looking at these breathtaking images, we can see where great cultures have evolved, and we can be fascinated by the intensity of these photographs. Hütte has captured fourteen ancient sites with his camera and extended his explorations in many more visits, capturing for instance Miletus, Perge, Didyma, Euromos, and Priene, using his own unique visual language. 

The success of Borusan Contemporary draws much of its energy from the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, which has been effectively built up for over thirty years.  
A part of this exhibition is thus fed by Hütte's pictures included in the collection.

These images not only reflect the cultural and internationally valid aspirations of the collection but also equally reflect a commitment to culturally and historically important cities in the diversity of their cultural expressions, preserving their important cultural heritage and anchoring it in the cultural consciousness of the international community. 

For Hütte, the project remains unexplored even today, after many visits. The almost mythical presence of the place, which can still be felt today, continues to give inspiration for bringing the unique aesthetic quality of this place into new images. 

Few artists in the world travel as extensively and intensively as Axel Hütte, who searches for motifs all over the world, from the Arctic to the rainforest, from Japan to Australia. In fact, there are motifs such as the series of Jacobi Garden, which were created not far from the artist's studio in Düsseldorf, in a small landscape park in the middle of the city. Or the atmospheric Niederwald pictures, which were taken around 2009 only a few hundred kilometers from Düsseldorf. 

His photographs of the forests in the Rheingau, form the inspirational basis for Hütte’s pictures. But the Niederwald series places the forests into atmospheric actuality, far removed from the black-and-white photography of the new objectivity movement. 

His fog-covered forests create a mood as tangible as a sense of humidity. The Jacobi Garden and the Niederwald pictures are excellent examples of how Hütte can create moods inside the picture. While the gardens seem almost impressionistically serene, there is always a sense of the mythical power of nature in the woods.