ART PALACE

SARAH LUHSE

// Sarah is based in Germany and has always loved the arts. She started to take pictures of the impressions of her life with her cellphone, but now more often than not uses a digital camera. Before museums locked down last year, she was able to capture these impressions from the Kunstpalast Duesseldorf.

“Art is only art where it is an end in itself, where it is absolutely free, left to itself, where it knows no higher laws than its own, the laws of truth and beauty.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

What draws you to art?

“That’s a hard question. I‘ve been drawing and painting my whole life and love the atmosphere of museums and theatres. It is not even the case that a topic has to interest me particularly. I‘m quite open minded in this regard.”

What impressed you most about the exhibition of Romantic painters you visited?

“I am impressed by the ability to paint in great detail on large formats.”

The Kunstpalast Duesseldorf stands at the location of the originally constructed art museum that had opened in 1902, but does not retain any of the original neo-classicist (neo-baroque/renaissance) architecture. It was redesigned in 1925 and 1926 for a trade fair on health care and fitness, and from 1999 to 2000 the last remaining building structure from 1902 was completely demolished for the new modern structure of the Museum Kunstpalast.

It was just one day before a new Covid-19 lock-down in Germany when Sarah visited the exhibition „Caspar David Friedrich and the Duesseldorfer Romantics“. Friedrich was one of the foremost German early Romantic painters and had artistic exchanges with various representatives of Duesseldorf landscape painting in the 19th century. In Sarah´s photo series you can see some of the beautiful and impressive artworks in the exhibition as well as the museum´s architecture.

Sarah chooses to present her photographic work in black and white. She feels that by editing in black and white, she can reduce an image to its essentials and consciously focus on its contrasts, shapes and textures. As for her focus on art photography, she is often interested in the clear lines of the external and internal architecture of a museum or a building in general. She decides which work of art to photograph depending on how impressed she is with the artwork, but sometimes she also decides based on a certain perspective in the museum or a special reflection (keywords light and shadow).

The exhibition is a collaboration with the MdbK (Museum der bildenden Künste) in Leipzig, where it will be presented from 3 March to 6 June 2021.

Images may be cropped for layout. Click on the photos to see the full image.