Joachim Richau

Over the course of four decades, Joachim Richau has created a diverse yet cohesive body of work featuring a multitude of internal references. Richau’s work is mostly expressed through long-term cycles, which he organises into groups of works, all of which stem from personal references and a biographical approach. Any attempt to present a retrospective of his work can only succeed if it illustrates the interrelationships between the individual series and cycles within the three groups of works, as well as their lines of development.

Following the subjectively documentary works in the body of work ‘HORIZONT or the Illusion of the Foreign’, Richau began, from the mid-1990s onwards, to explore the structures of the landscape—particularly in Scandinavia—through his photography in the cycle ‘FRAGMENT or the Presence of Doubt’. The self-taught artist and maverick thus created a self-contained body of work full of metaphors that consistently reflect the relationship between the inner and the outer, the familiar and the foreign. Driven by scepticism towards the medium and a single style, the artist draws on a wide range of photographic methods and techniques: change remains his guiding principle in life and art.

Biographical information
Jochim Richau was born in (East) Berlin in 1952. He lives in Berlin and the Uckermark. He has been working as a freelance photographer since 1983. The artist always considers the realisation of his various cycles in terms of publication, both in exhibitions and in books, as a separate form of his work. In addition to these publications, Richau can point to numerous exhibitions at home and abroad, participation in festivals (Turin, Arles), several scholarships and prizes, purchases by institutions, museums and private collections.