Exhibition Opening: Elias Wessel’s “In the End, though, Nothing is Lost”

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents the exhibition Elias Wessel’s “In the end, though, nothing is lost.” Please join us for the exhibition opening accompanied by an artist talk on Friday, April 6, at 6:00pm. The exhibition will be on view until May 26.

Exhibition information

The pictorial source of “In the End, Though, Nothing is Lost” are photographs of landscapes taken by Elias Wessel during an artist residency in Kursk, Russia. There, the city administration demands rapid urbanization; old houses are demolished and citizens are forcibly displaced. The concern lies in the image making process. The nature of photography, to depict a virtual image of reality, is being destroyed. Houses and people vanish. By analogy this process and resulting images reflect the city’s intention and consequences of modernization.

“Within the residency project, the artist was urged to produce documentary material in relation to those areas designated, prior to their subsequent demolition and future commercial development, as shopping malls and offices. The simple documentary idea gave the artist considerable aesthetic anxiety, and he undertook to take one hand movement image each day at an elevated distance of one or two kilometres so that the images possessed a sense of a semi-aerial viewpoint. The artist’s concerns with creating a pictorial (hence painterly) effect in these images expunged the immediacy of human presence and the images took on the character of abstractions” (Mark Gisbourne, “Visions of Synthesis – The Photography of Elias Wessel”).

About the artist

Elias Wessel was born in Bonn, studied at the University of Art and Design in Offenbach am Main, and is currently based in New York and Germany. He has had works exhibited at museums and institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art – MOCA Taipei; Museum Heylshof and Museum Andreasstift Worms; the Goethe-Institutes in Prague and Frankfurt am Main; Heinrich Hoffman Museum Frankfurt am Main; the NRW Forum Duesseldorf; the historic 1014 Fifth Avenue; and the German Consulate General in New York.