Painting with light!
Roland Blum shows an abstract formal language with his photography.
Opening: Thursday, June 12, 2025, from 6 p.m.
Opening speech: Sebastian Frommelt, 6.30 p.m.
Photographer Roland Blum is no stranger to Liechtenstein. With his landscape photographs - taken at lofty heights from a helicopter - he has won and continues to win numerous awards at various photography competitions.
Following a successful presentation of his work at the gallery of the same name in Vienna, bechter kastowsky galerie is now showing the “Poetry of Silence” series in Blum's home town of Schaan. His sensual black-and-white photographs have a painterly, enraptured and abstract effect. The distance from which the lens is directed at nature - in this case the Namibian desert - cannot be made out, and the works often appear to have been shot through a macro lens: Or have they zoomed in on an object? This shift is also visible in the materiality: the depicted surfaces, which consist of pure desert sand, look like soft silk fabrics or even bone fragments.
Roland Blum defines the image detail and conveys the beauty of our world in an impressive way. He shows that in our cosmos a second or even third look is often necessary in order to be able to grasp spatiality, materiality and distance at all.
This abstraction of the image motif, its all-over, which we normally know from the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists, impressively conveys that photography becomes, or can become, painting, that abstraction also gains a foothold in this medium and that awe-inspiring wonder can be captured with a camera lens.
Created in Namibia, these photo series are an enormous logistical and financial effort, as the areas flown over are only capable of this abstracting effect, which can rightly be described as beauty, in the light of the rising or setting sun. Roland Blum's works invite us to look at our world from above and to recognize its sublimity.
