Exhibition Curator Matthias Flügge joins us from Germany for an informative floor talk and exhibition tour.

The work of Ulrich Wüst first attracted attention in the 1980s Cityscapes, taken in several towns around what was then East Germany. These images bear witness to urban environments scarred by war and rebuilt hastily forming into a contemporary pastiche of transhistorical architectures. Finding humour and irony within not only architecture but more broadly in German history, Wust’s photography examines everyday situations, objects and materials while also finding unexpected connections and visual associations in photographs the artist has found. While the observations captured by Wust are essentially rooted in Germany’s historical division, and its subsequent process of mending, at the same time they relate to the universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations. Exhibiting at documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017, Ulrich Wust is a key figure in late 20th Century German photography.

Image: Ulrich Wüst, Berlin 1982, from the series Stadtbilder (1979–1985). Courtesy the artist and ifa.