Galerie Camera Obscura presents, through June 6, 2026, La paisible lumière des choses – Das Licht der stillen Dinge, an exhibition by German photographer Ingar Krauss.
Fascinated by portraiture (the genre through which his work was first recognized), he later turned to still life, which has occupied him almost exclusively for several years.
It is no coincidence that these two major genres in the history of art are at the heart of Ingar Krauss’s work, as he admires Balthus and the still lifes of Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560, Toledo–1627, Granada). Portraiture and still life share an exploration of the world that leaves haste and movement aside to focus on a motionless, meditative frame.
This photography is true to his character: concentrated and in direct contact with things, like a peasant or a craftsman.
The observation of nature and work in the garden are Ingar Krauss’s main sources of inspiration, and he often chooses to grow a vegetable or a flower specifically in order to photograph it.
For the shoot, the idea of isolating his subjects in a box came intuitively and allows him to photograph them in natural light, without a studio or lighting, creating an intimate, reserved space outside time.
The resulting light evokes classical painting which, in the half-light of north-facing studios, strove to capture with meticulous care the physical, but above all spiritual, presence of objects.
But, unlike that tradition, there is no symbolism to decipher in Ingar Krauss’s photographs, simply the presence and radiance of things. Except that this presence suspended in time indirectly evokes disappearance, the memento mori of every still life.
Ingar Krauss works traditionally in medium or large-format analog photography.
He makes the prints of his works himself, enlarging them on black-and-white silver-gelatin paper, which he then colors with oil paint. His own technique consists of oil-paint glazes applied to the damp paper so that the color penetrates the gelatin without affecting the surface of the photographic paper.
He limits his prints to eight copies.
Ingar Krauss was born in 1965 in East Berlin.
Self-taught, he began painting, then photographing, alongside a day job as a night watchman in a psychiatric hospital.
His work was discovered in the early 2000s: first shown in Germany, it quickly reached an international audience with exhibitions in the United States, Italy, France, and elsewhere in Europe.
He has received grants from the Department of Culture of the City of Berlin, the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Ministry of Culture of Brandenburg, and the Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, and has undertaken artist residencies in Moscow, Kaliningrad, Turin, Reggio Emilia, Jena, Dresden, and Davao (Philippines).
He has been represented in France by Galerie Camera Obscura since 2009.
Ingar Krauss : La paisible lumière des choses – Das Licht der stillen Dinge
Through June 6, 2026
Galerie Camera Obscura
268, boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris
Tel.: 01 45 45 67 08
www.galeriecameraobscura.fr
Tuesday-Friday: 12 PM-7 PM / Saturday: 11 AM-7 PM
