KREMS.- A major retrospective celebrating the life and work of Austrian artist Inge Dick has opened in Krems, bringing together more than six decades of artistic exploration centered on one elusive subject: light.

The exhibition, titled “Inge Dick. Touched by Light,” marks the artist’s 85th birthday and offers the most comprehensive survey of her work to date. From early drawings created in the 1960s to monumental Polaroid photographs and digital film works, the show traces a career devoted to observing the subtle transformations of daylight.

For Dick, light is not simply an element within an artwork—it is the artwork itself.

A lifelong exploration of light

Over the course of her career, Dick has developed a distinctive artistic language grounded in careful observation and patience. Her work examines how light shifts over time—changing from minute to minute, hour to hour, and season to season.

Through painting, photography, and film, she captures these fleeting transformations and turns them into meditative visual experiences.

Curator Gerda Ridler describes Dick’s career as one marked by remarkable independence.

According to Ridler, the artist has followed her own creative compass for more than six decades, working largely outside of market trends while maintaining an unwavering commitment to her vision. The growing international recognition of her work today, she notes, represents a long-overdue acknowledgment of a truly pioneering practice.

From white paintings to experimental photography

Dick’s artistic journey began with painting. Her early works included color compositions applied with a palette knife, which gradually evolved into her well-known “white paintings.”

These works may appear minimal at first glance, but their surfaces are carefully structured with delicate grid patterns designed to capture and reflect light.

Photographing these subtle effects proved difficult, however, and this challenge led the artist to pick up a camera in the 1980s. What began as documentation soon became a new artistic direction.

Dick started producing:

• Black-and-white photographic series exploring shadow and illumination

• Polaroid works focused on the changing tones of daylight

• Serial image sequences that reveal how light evolves over minutes and hours

Seen individually, the photographs appear simple. Viewed together, they reveal gradual shifts in color and atmosphere that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Working with the world’s largest Polaroid camera

One of the most remarkable moments in Dick’s career came in 1999, when she was invited to work at the Polaroid headquarters in Boston.

There, she used the largest Polaroid camera ever built, capable of producing photographs measuring 244 by 113 centimeters.

The results were striking. These monumental images present fields of color created under carefully controlled lighting conditions. Their depth and intensity often recall monochrome painting rather than traditional photography.

Each photograph also bears the physical traces of its creation—chemical marks from the development process and handwritten notes indicating the precise time of exposure—making every piece a unique object.

A new chapter in film

After Polaroid discontinued production of its large-format materials, Dick turned to digital film as a way to continue her investigation of light.

These works record long durations of changing daylight, capturing the slow evolution of color and atmosphere across hours and seasons.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the multi-part cycle “jahres licht weiss,” which explores how the spectrum of light transforms throughout the year. The work demonstrates how dramatically light shifts between winter, spring, summer, and autumn—even when the subject itself remains unchanged.

Seeing the value of a moment of light

Ultimately, the retrospective reveals the depth and consistency of Dick’s artistic vision. Across painting, photography, and film, her work invites viewers to slow down and notice something often overlooked: the fragile, fleeting beauty of light itself.

In a world saturated with images, Dick’s art offers a quiet reminder that even the most ordinary moment of daylight can hold extraordinary meaning.