Tour New Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart Untertürkheim
Walter Niedermayr
(*1952 in Bolzano, lives in Bolzano, I)
Artefakte 85/2005, 2005
[Artefacts 85/2005]
panoramic photograph, 3.20 x 60 m
Myth Room 4 Miracle Years (1945-60)
Mercedes-Benz Museum
Walter Niedermayr photographs mainly landscapes where civilization, urbanization and technicalization have made an impact. The artist's theme is transit spaces, and his images are unspectacular at a first glance, statically poised, and circling around natural structures. It is only on looking more closely that little ›disturbances‹ appear, human interventions.
Here the post-war vehicles stand in front of the membrane with Niedermayr's photo-installation, which runs right round the room. This is a series of eleven images, showing a view of the A6 between the Ligurian coast and Turin. It represents the massive transport structures that were built from the 1950s onwards to link the countries of Europe.
The special features of this stretch are the two carriageways, which were constructed 20 years apart and run separately from each other to a large extent. This way of addressing the ›fresh start and miracle years‹ in post-war Europe and the real confrontation with the cars from that period in the exhibition space lends the work an enigmatic ›site-specificity‹.
The title ›artefact‹ links the art-historical concept of the ›art product‹ with the irreversible insight that nature has now become an object processed by mankind.
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