Loredana Nemes
"Graubaum und Himmelmeer"
Ever since she chose photography over lexicology and mathematics, Loredana Nemes has lived in a whirlwind between camerawork, books, writing and teaching. In 2019, when she’d just left the vernissage of an exhausting major exhibition, she received a phone call that was to change the course of her work: an invitation to go to Rügen. She hadn’t known anything about the largest German island in the Baltic Sea but instantly succumbed to the powerful charm of its imposing cliffs. Like a far-off echo of the Transylvanian forests of her childhood, those growing in the Jasmund National Park fascinated her. It was to be the first of many visits, which continue to this day.
For almost 20 years, the artist mainly focused on human events and environments. She explored the worlds of the circus, public transport, marriage and the portrait, among others… Behind opaque restaurant windows and eye-to-eye, she captured moments of life, postures, complicities... Nature occasionally played a role: during a visit to Vietnam, and in Berlin, when several seagulls lunged at a piece of bread. Some of her images are accompanied by texts, as the photographer is also a poet. Over the course of time, her powerful, expressive vision has revealed mental and physical borderlines, areas of transition that leave the beholder free to make contact or distance themselves.
On Rügen, Berlin and its bustle are far away. Loredana Nemes walks by herself along the chalk cliffs, sometimes over 100 metres high, which emerge from the sky-blue waters. The spot is breathtakingly beautiful, truly inspirational. Always in black and white, Loredana Nemes’ images are not made to order. They require time, patience. The photographer prefers constancy to change. She always takes the same paths, to the same beech trees. She starts off by getting up close to it. Then she moves a good distance away and finally takes the photo. Presented at the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, the Graubaum und Himmelmeer series only exists thanks to the silence of winter, the murmurings of spring, the radiance of summer and the colours of autumn.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Loredana Nemes was born in 1972 and grew up in Romania. She left her native land with her parents in 1986 and moved to Germany, where she studied lexicology and mathematics before switching to photography. In 2001, she left Aachen for Berlin, where she worked as a freelance photographer and taught her chosen art in various institutions, including the Ostkreuzschule Berlin and the Goethe Institute. Her work initially focused on portraiture, tackling such themes as identity and personality. In 2019, she started taking a growing interest in nature. Her repeated stays on the island of Rügen have resulted in the Graubaum und Himmelmeer photographic cycle, where landscapes of beech trees go side by side with the immensity of the sea, season after season.
Her photographic work has received several awards and distinctions, and has been the subject of a number of works issued by the Hatje Cantz publishing house, including Loredana Nemes, Beautiful (2013), Unscharf. Nach Gerhard Richter (2011), and Loredana Nemes, beyond (2010).
Loredana Nemes is represented by the Springer Berlin Gallery.
