Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Yuste II (Niebla) [Yuste II (Fog)]

Image caption
AXEL HÜTTE

Yuste II (Niebla) [Yuste II (Fog)]

  • 2002
  • Digital pint on paper
  • 172 x 205 cm
  • Cat. F_74
  • Acquired in 2004
By:
Isabel Tejeda

In keeping with other works that see nature and space as a cultural landscape — pieces from his In Foreign Lands series come to mind —, Yuste I (2001) and Yuste II (Fog) (2002) take us to a setting with historical memory and also back to the 16th century. In this case that means the landscape of the retreat and last resting place of the Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, after his abdication in favour of his son Philip II of Spain: Yuste, in the La Vera region of Extremadura.

Hütte walks for kilometres experimenting with the landscape to search for his photographs. In this case, he produced two close ups of an oak grove at two different unrepeatable moments that are now long gone. In the morning mist, damp, mossy and set against the clean air, the oak grove is revealed and hidden in one case behind the fog, in the other behind itself. The perspectives used never place us within the landscape, but rather in front of it, at the aseptic, neutral viewpoint of the contemporary eye underlined by the lack of anecdotes and by the vertical structure of the trees that divide the photograph into strips, recalling the woody geometry of the Scenes from the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti by Sandro Botticelli (Prado, Madrid). Solitary and silent, with no visible marks of humans or animals (the human element emerges as a subject overlooked by the eye, in the landscape as a cultural construct), Hütte produces open images that show something that remains largely hidden: ‘I do not show reality, but fragments of it’.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Axel Hütte
Essen 1951

Axel Hütte studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (1973-1981), where he was taught by Bernd and Hilla Becher and his fellow students included some of the leading figures of the rehabilitation of photography undertaken by the so-called Düsseldorf School or New German Photography. His work, which was supported by grants to study in London and Venice from 1986 to 1988, was initially in black and white and small format, and was inspired by the essentialism of New Objectivity in urban landscapes with no human figures. His photographic work, developed around travel, began in the 1990s with a trip through southern Europe, and comprised large format photographs in colour. He achieved formal perfection and extraordinary details, capturing landscapes focused both on the architecture of cities and on the majesty and sublime character of nature; he embraced the idea of dissolving human dimensions by doing away with spatial references, in blocks of colour, elements and textures that are diluted or repeated ad infinitum, overriding any cultural or geographical references. Special mention should be made of his series Fog (1994-2003), which includes photos of Switzerland, Spain, Iceland, Germany and Hawaii; Tropics (1998-2002), with photographs of Australia, South Africa, Costa Rica and Brazil; and Night (1998-2003), in which he returns to the idea of architecture as landscape through night-time images of buildings in the most important cities of the planet, including Paris, London and New York.

Since his first solo show at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf in 1984, his work has been widely showcased at major international institutions, including exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany, 1993); and the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur, Switzerland, 1997). He has also exhibited in Spain at the Velázquez Palace, Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2004), the César Manrique Foundation (Lanzarote, 2004), the Telefónica Foundation (Madrid, 2008), the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 2009) and the San Telmo Museum (San Sebastián, 2014).

Roberto Díaz

 
«From Goya to our times. Perspectives of the Banco de España Collection», Musée Mohammed VI d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Rabat, 2017-2018).
Yolanda Romero & Isabel Tejeda De Goya a nuestros días. Miradas a la Colección Banco de España, Madrid & Rabat, AECID y FMN, 2017. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.