White Album

Bernd Uhde's search for traces in landscapes of silence. An impressionistic shimmer of dark dots against a bright expanse. Pattern of scattered characters and feathery braids on a white background. Horizontal and vertical bands that form a constructive composition in the white field. A white frame in which another white surface expands like a blank canvas.

On closer inspection, the abstractions fill with objective content: birds have left the finest prints on snowy fields, condensing into swirling patterns in a white sphere. Brown and green form stripes on snow-covered pasture. Winter trees produce branchy ornaments. And a swimming pool filled with snow becomes a monochrome painting – a “frame without a picture”.

The landscapes and urban terrains cultivated by man, which he captures with his camera while floating vertically from above at a height of between a hundred and a thousand meters, are “readymades”, visual finds whose aesthetic potential is only released through the distant view and reveals itself.

Uhde is like a researcher on a journey of discovery, but at the same time someone who looks at the world far below with the eye of a painter. In principle, he only explores landscapes in his own surroundings: areas that are familiar to him, but when viewed from an aerial perspective lose their familiarity and objectivity. Despite the local connection of his imagery, the scenes captured by Uhde hardly provide any information about their local anchoring.