Forests full of mystery, gardens that remain aloof from outside gazes, mountains whose fog-shrouded summits wind around us a thick veil – how animate does that nature seem which Axel Hütte conducts before our eyes in a sensitive roundelay, sovereign and at the same time distanced. Panoramas of seductive beauty absorb our gaze, cause it to glide across seemingly homogeneous surfaces as in an all-over painting by Jackson Pollock, and simultaneously put it in its place: nature presents itself to us in sheer impenetrability, refuses to be romanticized. “Nature is not nature but rather a concept, a norm, a memory, a utopia, a counter-design,” the sociologist Ulrich Beck once formulated.

And yet these seemingly surreal landscapes which draw their creative power from nature’s own richness of form and nuance come to offer an aesthetic pleasure. Hütte’s landscape photographs, reproduced here in outstanding printing quality, summon us “to look at them with as much reference to structure or color as with an abstract painting” (Lucius Grisebach). This artist’s book does one thing more: it opens up a space for these fascinating, wide formats and draws us into the irresistible current of Hütte’s images.

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In collaboration with Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin