Presentation
These fascinating “landscapes of the soul”, whose pictorial quality the artist so insistently upholds, are the fruit of a new romanticism fully assumed by this great photographer from the Düsseldorf School.
The evocative power of Elger Esser’s landscapes generates emotions that go well beyond a simple documentary vision.
A Franco-German artist, Elger is represented in such major collections as the Guggenheim in New York and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, with an international reputation rooted in art history. A pupil of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, he broke away from their teachings when he discovered landscape. Armed with his camera, he travels from country to country, photographing and inventorying timeless landscapes in which neither humankind nor its imprint is visible. His photos, testimonies caught between history and memory, are inspired by the writings of Proust, Flaubert and Maupassant. He finds his literary and pictorial inspirations in the 19th century, along with the techniques he experiments with and reinvents (heliogravure and copperplate).
