BildRaum

Walter Niedermayr at Robert Miller Gallery
February 12, 2009 - March 14, 2009

Neuseeland V (2004) 2 C-Prints, edition of 6

Consisting of fifteen photographic polyptychs of stark, vast panoramic vistas primarily centered on the tourist industry, BildRaum, Walter Niedermayr's current exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea, offer viewers a captivating visual transliteration of modern man's evolving place among the sublime. Reduced to the correspondence between two characters--man and nature--the photographs, taken from 2003 to the present, draw contrast between the abiding grandeur of the natural world and cursory mortal disorder. Other works in the exhibition including Niedermayr's newest BildRaum series, incorporate internal and external views of the New Museum, Manhattan--designed by Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, whose work Niedermayr has been chronicling for years.

Picayune human forms trudge in pairs up a prodigious, sandy slope devoid of context in Dune du Pyla 1, 2007. Sky and ground are blanched. Meditating on any of the nuanced interpersonal relationships captured here, one immediately dispenses with humanistic projection. Beings are diminished to colored pixels of red, black, and blue. The mammoth presence of idyllic nature suggests undertones of Romanticism, but disengagement of minuscule subjects ultimately yields a dearth of emotional attachment--both to the frontier and its settlers.

Sable cows speckling the pale green pasture in Neuseeland V (2004) appear as though they could be lifted from the picture plane with one fell swoop of a strong magnet. Across the way, Kitzstzeinhorn 31 (2007), could use a good dust-busting. Niedermayr says he assembles his compositions to "constantly undermine the automatic tendency to identify image and reality." Through his perspective and far range, the artist greatly succeeds at divesting his beings of psyche, thus inhibiting translation of any subjective reality therein.

The dignity of Niedermayr's images may lie in their faculty to induce--merely through passive portrayal--a search for significance in terrestrial worlds characterized exclusively by entropic minutiae. Les Deux Alpes XX, 2008, depicts skiers standing in line for a t-lift to carry them up a snowy mountain. From such a removed distance, the ski lift's wiry framework assumes tenuous proportions more synonymous to croquet hoops. Indistinct skiers converge in a dominant line through the second and third panels, adopting an ostensible purpose through their self-organization. In the first and second panel, figurative whisps descend arbitrarily on their skis from the snowcapped crest--a form of organized recreation that Niedermayr deems an unnatural "management system of pleasure".

Niedermayr's photographs convey that our wont to supersede nature with organized leisure is ultimately fallible. The tourist infrastructure is both an expression of and a catalyst for modern man's waning symbiotic relationship with the wild. Niedermayr furthers this theme through his fancy for desolate locales, many enveloped in blinding white light and characterized by sand, snow, and immovable mountains. The abstract rendering of his settings and characters in a pictorially reductive manner aesthetically inclines what may have once served as a ready segue into the realm of metaphysical, interpretation. But the palpable distance--both physical and emotional--of his images ultimately prevails in rendering speculation futile.


1. Dune Du Pyla I, 2007. 4 C-prints (81.9" x 103.1")
2. Kitzstzeinhorn 31, 2007. 2 C-prints (41" x 104.8")
3. Les Deux Alpes XX, 2008. 3 C-prints (41" x 154.75")