Das stille Sein (The Stillness of Being) is the third Elger Esser solo exhibition at the Van der Grinten Galerie. We are pleased to present a selection of his latest works, the result of his explorations in the north of France. At different times of the day and year he photographed Mont-Saint-Michel, ebb and flow in the tidal flats, the coastline and, farther inland, the landscapes along the course of the Loire in which the river is embedded.

For 30 years, Elger Esser has travelled the regions of France searching for archetypical landscapes. In his most recent works the experience of landscape concentrates on the transition from the coastline to the sea and on up into the sky above, with its spectacle of changing cloud formations. The possibilities offered by the techniques that Esser himself has developed have clearly provided a strong impetus for his artistic development: a direct pigment printing process is used to transfer the analog photography images to silver-plated copper plates, which are then coated with shellac and mounted in specially designed frames, so that the finished work appears to be an organic hybrid of painting and photography. The metallic foundation layer amplifies the photographically captured light and its play of reflections in the sky and water, significantly intensifying the radiance of the colors. This element of depth and vitality inherent in the picture is heightened by the viewer’s own movement in front of the work, as both light and colors seem to change with a shifting perspective. The result is a perfect congruity of the portrayal and the portrayed.

The landscapes of Elger Esser emanate an overwhelming presence, yet the images are most often of inconspicuous places. He is intent on  distilling a landscape down to its essence. A recurring theme in the artist’s work is the interconnection of nature with testaments of building culture, but in such a way that the motifs exist in a realm devoid of chronological or spatial markers, giving rise to something universal and timeless. It is from this vantage point that Esser views the stupendous silhouette of Mont-Saint-Michel, which has rested for a millennium in the breathtakingly beautiful tidal seascape, as a symbol of the experience of the immanence of things. 

Why does watching the setting and rising of the sun hold human beings the world over in its thrall? Perhaps because we find in this natural phenomenon a clearly visible manifestation of beauty, an otherwise so abstract and often controversial concept, perhaps also because it gives the individual a feeling of belonging to the world, to a great, incomprehensible whole. To view the beauty of the landscape in the wonder of the light is to take pause and marvel, to be still and to feel and hear one’s own inner self in the stillness of being. It is to access a profound level, a space in which the enigmas of existence lie hidden, far from the loud and hectic constraints of daily life.

Elger Esser was born in 1967 in Stuttgart and grew up in Rome. From 1991 to 1997 he studied with Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Esser’s work is represented in the following museum collections, among others: Guggenheim Museum New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Kunsthaus Zürich, Centre Pompidou Paris, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus Munich, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

The title of the show is a play on words that hints at the content: for Grey Le Gray Elger Esser for the first time and in his own subtle way, explores the work of Gustave Le Gray, the preeminent landscape photographer of the mid-19th century. The technological limitations of the day – including the inability to reproduce genuine color and the long exposure times necessitated by the quality of the emulsions – prompted Le Gray (1820–1884) to draw on his own resourcefulness and ingenuity as he experimented with innovative techniques and processes to advance the state-of-the-art. But the uniqueness of his work stems mainly from the fact Le Gray, an academically trained painter, always maintained his identity as an artist, although in that period photography was not deemed a fully-fledged art form equal to painting. Le Gray’s artistic sense of composition is most clearly displayed in his work series ‘Marines’ (seascapes). With the carefully considered combination of two different negatives, each from a separate exposure – one of the sky, one of the sea – he created stunning visual compositions of lines, light and contrasts, of calm and of dynamic spaces. Le Gray was not pursuing a realistic depiction of the world in the photographic medium; he was interested in conveying a sensation of being in this world.

In the new Elger Esser exhibition Van der Grinten Galerie is pleased to present the artist’s most recent works, born of the impulse he received from immersing himself in the work of Le Gray. These new seascapes, with their extremely reduced color spectrum and subtle tonal values, dry ink printed on silver coated copper plates, do not depict any specific landscapes. Rather, the images reflect Esser’s ongoing artistic exploration of the possibilities of portraying the idea of a landscape, a consistent pursuit of the artist since the mid-90s. Along the way he has continued to delve into the history of European visual art – both photography and painting – and 19th century literature, in other words, with the real beginning of modernism: Proust, Flaubert, Huysmans, Maupassant, Corot, die Barbizon School, Monet, Le Gray.

In a sort of reversal of the Le Gray biography, Elger Esser is a photographer who has virtually become a painter. In his pictures he transfers what he sees into an imaginarydimension that is temporal, yet purposely also removed from the present. It is an exalted dimension that connects us with the time before and after our time, and, like an echo, resonates with something deep within.

We are pleased to present the latest work of Elger Esser in his first solo exhibition at the Van der Grinten Galerie. To assert that Elger Esser is representative of the Düsseldorf School of Photography, the purposeful, conceptual approach of his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher, may seem surprising given the aching beauty and emotional impact of his images.  Though Elger’s expression is entirely his own, the influence is apparent in a shared focus: a consistent, committed exploration of the possibilities of the photographic image in a fine arts context. In other words: on a plane that transcends the inconsequential and superficial, with the ambivalent nature of photography as the acknowledged subject and point of departure.

Esser repeatedly turns his artistic and intellectual attention to landscapes (generally featuring bodies of water), locations where the eye cannot cling to borders, making objects and events seem infinite. Viewers are left to draw their own conclusions, which elicits the same subjective response as objective “reality”. Although these sites, the places that Esser discovers and explores on his many travels, are contemporary locations his work coaxes the timelessness out of them, especially by means of sensitive, subdued coloration and the use of elaborate printing techniques, including some very hands-on historical ones. The Proustian search for time lost is extended to include lost places, a trigger of subconscious remembrance.

In his most recent work, images gathered in Northern France, Elger Esser has printed the photographs on silver-coated copper plates, once a material-of-choice for Baroque painter Adam Elsheimer as it allows for exceedingly thin paint application, letting the luminous ground shimmer through to enrich the effect of the oil paint. Compared to Esser’s earlier work the luminosity of the colors here is extreme, and exposed to various lighting scenarios the photographs have a spatial quality and a depth that seems endless.

Esser subverts a fundamental feature of photography: the notion of the precise preservation of a moment in time. His photographs evoke a world where time and place, coordinates of exact documentation, are relative.

Elger Esser was born in 1967 in Stuttgart and grew up in Rome. He studied with Bernd Becher from 1991 to 1997 at the Academy of Fine Arts Düsseldorf.

Works by Elger Esser are represented in the following museum collections, among others: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Kunsthaus Zürich, Centre Pompidou Paris, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, DZ Bank Kunstsammlung Frankfurt am Main.