Since the 1990s German photo artist Thomas Wrede (born 1963) has garnered international attention with variously conceived photo series. Taking real natural, landscape and city settings as their starting point, his artistic images transform these and imbue them with an ambiguous and absurd-surreal quality. In his large-scale colour photographs Wrede creates spaces for longings and Utopias that build on catchy image patterns and defy temporal and spatial placing. His image series stage nature and landscape in terms of a visual pitfall and phantasma, prompting us to subject them to closer scrutiny. The exhibition Anywhere presents a selection of photographs from the two series Real Landscapes (started in 2005) and Seascapes (2001-2007), which play a pivotal role in Thomas Wrede’s oeuvre. Both bodies of work are intrinsically linked to the landscape of the North Sea coast, since, in addition to the Lusatian mining district in eastern Germany, the beaches and dunescapes of the North Frisian islands serve as a preferred setting for Wrede’s photo art. Thomas Wrede plays with perspectives and scale shifts, acting as urban planner, landscape architect and gardener by creating miniature landscapes that project a sense of false pretenses, as we behold enchanted places and undreamt-of panoramas that appear at once idyllic and transient, pristine and civilized. The exhibition Anywhere is a joint project of the Museum Kunst der Westküste and of kunst:raum sylt quelle which, concurrently with the Museum Kunst der Westküste exhibition, will show a representative cross-section of Thomas Wrede’s oeuvre based on various photo series, including the Magic Worlds (1998), Domestic Landscapes (2000-01), Manhattan Picture Worlds (2002-07) and Wrapped Landscapes (2002). Thomas Wrede lives and works in Münster, Germany. He has received numerous awards for his photographic art and has shown his work in many solo and group exhibitions throughout the world. In conjunction with the exhibition a catalogue will be published by Kehrer Verlag.
