Austrian artist Hermann Fuchs, whose works are being shown in China for the first time this year, lives and works in the Austrian province of Braunau am Inn. Already in his school days, he had a burning interest in different varieties of art and began to take photographs, at that time still in black and white with a Canon F1 camera. He built his own laboratory and expanded photography to photographic art. Landscape and
portraits, as well as surreal compositions were created and received praise and recognition at improvised exhibitions. He formulated his photographic artistic aspirations as follows: “The depiction of the external, no matter how perfectly staged, is ultimately boring. In order to achieve an intellectual confrontation and a certain interpretation, it must be possible to arrive at an association via emotion and further to critical reflection. This succeeds through alienation or abstraction, by peeling out the essence-forming elements of an object or by reinterpreting them.” That sounds complicated at first. But if you look at the works of Hermann Fuchs created in this way, there is little to be seen of this highly complex production process, at least at first glance. The pictures speak for themselves, they pose riddles, they arouse curiosity, they release emotions, and they unsettle the usual perception. The artist Hermann Fuchs uses dolls, torsos, or individual body parts that make an appearance. For the work “Judge Dredd” as well as for the work “Elephant Man” the contourless head of a mannequin served as primary material.