(1970- )
Andreas Gefeller(b.1970) lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He studied photography at the University of Essen and was appointed to the German Academy of Photography in 2001. Andreas Gefeller is known for his stunningly complex photographic tapestries, which engage photography's enduring yet controversial juxtaposition of fiction and truth. His massive, chaotic images depict, with laser-like focus, the details of streets and public spaces, drawing them into three dimensions and lending them the complex, frenetic energy of the cosmos.
Indeed, Gefeller attributes his discovery of the camera to a childhood obsession with astronomy, a fascination with the formerly invisible surfaces of planets and moons—surfaces made visible by the telescope's light and lens. He has since spent his career investigating the details of the surfaces of our lives; bits of brightly colored garbage and cigarette butts caught in a sidewalk drain, or the pattern of a hotel's balconies viewed from the beach. His interest in illuminating things we tend not to see, even when they are in front of our eyes, has been a recurring theme throughout his work. In Halbwertszeiten, an early series from 1996, he took photographs of deserted homes and streets after the Chernobyl disaster, giving photographic form to the radioactive energy we cannot see, but know is present. In Soma, he used his camera to capture the colors undetectable to the human eye at night, revealing the world of the dark more truthfully than we have ever known it. “In this case,” the artist has said, “our eyes show a false picture of the world, not the camera.”