There is a certain intangibility in the aesthetic practice of Daniel Maier-Reimer, which takes the form of travels. From Lapland to New Zealand, the artist has created nearly fifty of these works in three decades. He often spends months alone on the road, traveling mostly on foot and orienting himself either by using landmarks like mountains and rivers or by following geopolitical boundaries or city limits. The artist records his wanderings with photography, while resisting the conventional tropes of the documentary format. He uses simple, analog, lightweight cameras and doesn’t see the results until he develops the film. Within the gallery, the works generally manifest themselves in the form of a single photograph, sometimes two. There are only rarely more; sometimes there are none at all. This aligns Maier-Reimer’s practice with the conceptual tradition initiated by Stanley Brown and Hamish Fulton, among others: travel as a space of individual experience that virtually escapes representation. This is why the artist considers his images – whose deliberately disjointed character goes against the clichés of the travel genre – not as “art photography”, but as an integral part of the journey.
Maier-Reimer often relinquishes interpretative control further by entrusting the presentation of his work to others. For his personal exhibition in Clages, he collaborated with Mark Dion, who staged the gallery’s foyer as a travel agency. Between shelves of brochures and guidebooks, Dion has discreetly incorporated four of Maier-Reimer’s works: Lapland Autumn1990; Kaliningrad Peninsula2001; Tyrrhenian Sea in Adria, 2013; And Trip on Etna, 2022. Maier-Reimer himself uses the same motifs in the other rooms of the gallery, but he organizes them in his own way: a single piece per room, white walls, large frames and a generous passe-partout. This contrast is also part of the artists’ collaboration. The intertwining of contexts underlines the way photography transforms real places into imaginary spaces.
Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.
