Christian Voigt – Portraits of Space

Christian Voigt (born 1961) works with large-format digital and analogue cameras. He experiments with new photographic techniques and makes the most of the digital medium. “My images are created with the camera, not with the computer,” he says, referring to the complex technology and processing involved in his creations. Thanks to today’s computer technology, the images can then be brought into their final form.

The artist, who lives in Hamburg and the south of France, has developed a visual language of his own for his often large-format photographs, one that seeks to reveal more than the eye can usually perceive. The result is, at times, architectural works featuring subjects such as the Prado in Madrid or the Morgan Library in New York City. As part of his series of library and museum interiors, these photographs convey the austerity and beauty of the architecture, within which Christian Voigt’s worldview is concentrated, as if under a magnifying glass. For the photographer, the question of a space’s identity plays a fundamental role. In the exhibition “Portraits of Space”, we present a selection of images of deserted spaces and places that offer a new and individual perspective on seemingly familiar structures. Sometimes at great effort, Christian Voigt travels to hard-to-reach places or photographs deserted buildings that are normally crowded, thereby granting the viewer a perspective that remains denied to the general public in this form. These spaces and places tell their own stories, man-made and yet entirely individual. They are places of encounter, communication and knowledge which, despite or perhaps precisely because of the absence of people, unfold their full effect and pose the question of their respective significance and identity to the viewer. Alongside architecture, his main interest lies in landscape; however, portraiture and nudes also feature in his work.

Christian Voigt became known, among other things, for his series of dinosaur portraits from international natural history museums. The photographer has already held numerous solo exhibitions.

Please feel free to drop by at any time.

28 April 2023 – 17 June 2023 at Jungfrauenthal 4, Hamburg

The Austrian National Library – Vienna