Roland Fischer, among the most prominent voices in German photography today, has completed a new portfolio with Durham Press. Titled Night and Day, the twelve works are the first woodblock prints the artist has created with the Press.
Renowned for his large-format photographs of buildings in locales ranging from his adopted hometowns of Munich and Beijing to cities across the world, Fischer produces detailed views of modern and contemporary architecture. He often captures facades up close in order to transform them into abstracted, flattened patterns. His images emphasize each structure’s distinctive qualities but simultaneously call attention to the homogenizing impact of globalization. Without the context of a skyline or geographic elements, many of these pictures conceivably could have been taken in almost any metropolis in the world.
Night and Day is a new extension of this photographic work both in concept and medium. Rather than depict actual, completed buildings, the portfolio presents a collection of imagined constructions and reconstructions. The artist extracted shapes and lines from various images he has accumulated during his travels and used these as the basis for series of new compositions. While the resulting prints can be read as hard-edge and purely geometric, the viewer can also imagine them as architectural forms: one might be a section of a modernist grid; others, a curving staircase reminiscent of Zaha Hadid’s; still others, an undulating roofline designed by Herzog & de Meuron.
The works were printed in relief, each with multiple individually inked woodblocks, which allowed the artist to further distill and simplify the shapes. However, by using a split-fountain technique (two inks blended together in a gradient on the same roller), Fischer imbued each with an illusion of volume and a sense of a dynamism that echoes the drama of Italian Futurism, a group of artists who similarly turned toward abstraction as a way to understand their rapidly changing cities. Evoking both past conceptions of metropolitan futures and the cutting-edge constructions of this century, Night and Day is, in Roland Fischer’s words, “a reflection on our contemporary, perhaps urban, visual reality.”
Night and Day, as well as other works by Roland Fischer, are available directly through Durham Press. For more information, please contact us at sales@durhampress.com.