WOLF NKOLE HELZLE condensed photography

Three current series will be presented in the rooms of Prolab Fotofachlabor GmbH, Stuttgart, from 24 March to 5 June 2017:

WALKS
Whether in Venice, San Francisco, Japan or China, Wolf Helzle is always on the road. He takes many photo shoots per walk, always in the direction of the way. Through the processing, the translucent layering - from many individual pictures becomes one - the phenomenon of the "simultaneity" occurs, space and time are condensed. The transformed nature allows the viewer to enter the landscape into a place where space and time no longer play the role where silence and inspiration await him.

CIRCLES
In the autumn of 2015, Helzle was invited by the College of Art and Design in Beijing for giving lectures to China. With the inclusion of his 40 students, he developed this unique figurative series. For this purpose, the students placed themselves in a large circle in the courtyard of the university and one in the middle. All students photographed the one at the same time with their smartphones. Afterwards all the individual portraits were translucently layered - similar to the landscapes - and these poetic all-round 360-degree figures appeared.

FACES
For his multiple portraits, the artist asks "who are we?" around the world. Amongst other things - with the 40,000 photographed persons - is the equivalence of the individual and the collective. The one is the other. And then we recognize an African aspect, a Japanese one, a European one, a universal one, from hundreds and thousands of individual shots through transparent layers. He develops the software together with students from the TU Munich and Nuremberg, who work at InterFace AG in Unterhaching as  working students.

Wolf Nkole Helzle (born in 1950) studied painting and sculpture at the Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart and at the College of Fine Arts Kassel with Prof. Harry Kramer. He also worked for 20 years in the software and hardware industry, mainly to support his family. Twenty-one years ago, he changed to the subject of media art and now works exclusively with photography, video, installations and performances. One of the central themes of his artistic work is the question of the relationship between the one and the many. This question is addressed both in the national as well as in the international context, as at the Ogaki Biennial in Japan and the Biennial media_city Seoul, South Korea. He was invited by the College of Art and Design, Beijing, and many German and European exhibition projects and festivals.