Joachim Richau

Over the course of four decades, Joachim Richau has created a heterogeneous yet self-contained oeuvre with a multitude of internal references. Richau's work is mostly reflected in long-term cycles, which he organises into work complexes and which all arise from personal references and with a biographical approach. The attempt to present a retrospective of his work can only succeed in a form that shows the mutual relationships between the individual series and cycles within the three work complexes as well as their strands of development.

After the subjective documentary works in the series "HORIZONT or the Illusion of the Foreign", Richau began in the mid-1990s to focus photographically on the structures of landscapes, especially in Scandinavia, in the series "FRAGMENT or the Presence of Doubt". The autodidact and loner thus created a self-sufficient body of work full of metaphors in which the relationship between inside and outside, self and other is always reflected. Sceptical of the medium and a single style, the artist resorts to a variety of photographic methods and means: change remains his life and art principle.

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.