The series “Erdgeist” by Patrick Bogner, published in 2020 by L’Atelier contemporain and exhibited at L’ANGLE in 2021, staged the theme of the Sublime, inspired by the early Romanticism that emerged from Goethe’s Sturm und Drang. This approach is rooted in a form of landscape painting that seeks to provoke a contemplation close to that of sacred images. The works of Caspar David Friedrich, as well as the writings of Victor Hugo, Hölderlin and Blake, among others, served him as spiritual and artistic guides.
“Hivernies” extends this reflection, nourished by landscapes whose intensity increases with latitude. These spaces, marked by the absolute and by transcendence, question the submission of nature to invisible forces, blending Western and Eastern influences. In the photographer’s own words, his intention is to “make the immaterial tangible, by revealing an original, silent space where winter becomes a metaphor for the cult of the infinitesimal, of emptiness and of the invisible.”
The Arctic winter, often perceived as hostile, offers a meditation between nature and the divine. In the West, these northern landscapes evoke the ends of the earth, while in China, the tradition of shanshui (mountain-and-water painting) reveals the vital forces and hidden harmonies of nature. This “way”, in which poetry and painting are one, has deeply influenced the artist’s approach, who sees the Far North as a frontier between allegory and reality.
The photographs in this series, made in Greenland and Svalbard, are inspired by great Chinese masters such as Fan Kuan and Mei Qing, for whom white spaces stimulate the imagination. Patrick Bogner thus reinterprets “the brush and the ink” in his relationship to the landscape, exploring the links between geography, imagination and spirituality, and bearing witness to the energies that traverse these spaces.
Patrick Bogner : Hivernies
Until 19 December 2025
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64700 Hendaye
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