Jens Knigge ─ Contact - Northern Light

Humility in the face of nature and its inimitable sublimity: that is the feeling that overcomes Jens Knigge (b. Eilenburg, Germany, 1964; lives and works in Berlin) during his wintertime travels along the Arctic Circle. He has recorded his impressions of snow-covered landscapes and the mysterious aurora borealis in mostly small-format platinum-palladium prints. In the end, the contact sheets of the negatives of his analog photographs illustrate the inadequacy of established formal idioms and modes of expression. For it seems to be virtually impossible to render the essence of the experience of nature with the means of photography. Knigge’s pictures accordingly hover between figuration and abstraction; as though the artist, with each new picture, encircled a mystical space opening up between surface and depth. Knigge’s landscape pictures are sustained by the ultimate defeat of the will to document and depict before a “white abyss of infinity.” With an introductory essay by the journalist and art critic Ralf Hanselle.