In search of poetry in urban spaces

The minimalist photographs of Hanover-based artist Guido Klumpe depict a world in which the sun is almost always shining. Because bright sunshine provides him with ideal lighting conditions for finding compositions full of pictorial wit, poetry and aesthetics, painted in bright colours in urban spaces, preferably functional places like railway platforms, shopping centres or petrol stations. In sober facades and random passers-by, in glaring light and the play of shadows, in white clouds and pitch-black ravens, Klumpe discovers stories that are as fleeting as they are easy to miss. Using unusual perspectives and surprising pictorial details, he distils tiny moments of great attraction from the everyday life of the city. In doing so, he often moves in the interstices of classical genres, creating an aesthetic between painting and photography, oscillating between narrative street scenes and strictly reduced abstraction.

For the artist, inspired by Mondrian, Rothko and Hopper, minimalism is far from an end in itself. Rather, it is rooted in his very own way of understanding the world. Guido Klumpe has been severely visually impaired since birth, completely blind in his left eye and with only 25% vision in his right eye. This has always forced him to translate between a two-dimensional perception and the space of the environment. His approach to the world is therefore minimalist and literally shaped by his own perspective, which enables him in a special way to extract the essence from the abundance of impressions and to enrich the world through reduction.

More about the artist: Guido Klumpe's artist page