Akademie der Künste presents from Thursday, May 9, 2024 the exhibition Poetry of Time. Michael Ruetz – Timescapes 1966-2023. How can time and transience be made visible, how can upheavals and changes in a society or an urban space be documented? Michael Ruetz has dealt with these questions more than almost any other artist. Since the mid-1960s, he has been observing the transformation of natural and urban environments in his large-scale photographic study Timescapes.
Image above: © Michael Ruetz bei Aufnahmen zum Timescape-Projekt, Standfoto aus: FACING TIME, Dokumentarfilm, 2023, Produktion und Regie: Annett Ilijew © Foto: Ines Thomsen © Annett Ilijew und Michael Ruetz
His works of Berlin are the focus of the exhibition at Pariser Platz. The profound changes in German society in the post-war period, after reunification and in the present are particularly effectively condensed in the photographic sequences. Locations of power or historical relevance such as Potsdamer Platz, the Brandenburg Gate, Schlossplatz, Gendarmenmarkt, the government district or the Berlin Wall have undergone rapid change, especially since 1989/90. Ruetz’s photographs of Berlin tell of how architecture can shape and reshape our living spaces, thereby gaining a sovereignty of interpretation over our perception. His timescapes develop their own aesthetic beyond documentary sobriety, revealing a poetry of time.
Michael Ruetz, born in Berlin in 1940, is one of Germany’s most renowned photo artists. He began his career at the end of the 1960s as a member of the Stern editorial team in Hamburg. He became famous for his photographs of the West German student movement, among other things. His pictures from the APO period are now just as much a part of the collective visual memory as his reportage photos from Greece during the military dictatorship or of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Ruetz has been working as a freelance photographer since 1975 and mainly realizes book projects. From 1982 to 2007, he was a full professor of communication design at the Braunschweig University of Art. He has received several awards, including the Otto Steinert Prize in 1979 and the Villa Massimo Prize in 1981. In 2002, he was appointed Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Michael Ruetz has been a member of the film and media art section of the Akademie der Künste since 1998.
WHEN?
Opening:
Wednesday, 08. May 2024, 7 pm
Exhibition period:
Thursday, 09. May until Sunday 04. August 2024
Opening hours:
Thu – Sun, 11 am to 7 pm
WHERE?
Akademie der Künste
Pariser Platz 4
10117 Berlin
COST?
Regular: 10 €
Reduced: 7 €
free up to 18 years, Tuesdays and every first Sunday of the month
