VIENNA.- For the first time, the
Gallery OstLicht dedicates a show to Ulrich Seidl’s photographic works. The exhibition includes about 70 selected stills taken from films dated 2001 to today: Hundstage (Dog Days), 2001, Import Export, 2007, Brüder, lasst uns lustig sein (Brothers, Let Us Be Merry), 2006, the Paradies Trilogy Liebe, Glaube, Hoffnung (Paradise. Love, Faith, Hope), 2012 and Im Keller (In the Basement), 2014.
Ulrich Seidl’s unerring eye and his instinct for composition are undisputed. His tableaus, generated with almost photographic meticulousness, provide far more than fleeting insights into the often oppressive subjects of his oeuvre as a filmmaker: composed with the greatest accuracy down to the most minute detail, their clear aesthetics and severe geometry render themconvincing.
In Seidl’s photographs, objects and individuals become compositional elements in space. A precise visual order takes over here. In his stills, the documentary element inherent in his films recedes almost entirely into the background. They are defined by the character of the specific staging and the static picture’s inherent tension between aesthetics and existence. By singling out specific film frames and thereby withdrawing any action from the film, alienation – a hallmark of his symmetrical picture settings – becomes more pronounced than ever. Thus, Seidl’s uncompromising compositions work even when completely isolated from his films, and, transferred to the medium of photography, they exert profound fascination as independent works.
Especially in Seidl’s latest film, Im Keller (In the Basement), the photographic gaze of the film author and director dominates. Arranged picture by picture, minute-long tableau depictions succeed each other, the protagonists remaining almost motionless in one position. “The photography for Im Keller (In the Basement), has all the director’s style characteristics,” the journalist and author Stefan Grissemann writes. "Seidl’s visual mannerism is the trump card in each of his games: as the only element that he never leaves to coincidence, it beats any other artistic ambition which might develop on the set. There is no escaping the prison of these images."
Ulrich Seidl was born in Vienna in 1952 and grew up in Horn in the Waldviertel. He studied at the Vienna Film Academy and made his directing debut in 1980 with the short film Einsvierzig. Ulrich Seidl has won numerous international film prizes for his documentaries such as Good News, Tierische Liebe and Models. In 2012, Paradies: Glaube won the jury’s special prize at the Venice Film Festival. Seidl’s first feature film, Hundstage, had already been granted the same distinguished award at the same festival eleven years before. In 2003 he founded the Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion GmbH, and ever since he has also been producing his own films. Import Export was admitted to the competition of the 60th Film Festival in Cannes in 2007. This was followed by the Paradies Trilogy in 2012: Paradies: Liebe, Paradies: Glaube, and Paradies: Hoffnung. These three films were shot within four years and premiered at the International Film Festivals in Cannes, Venice and Berlin. Im Keller had its premiere in August 2014 as part of the Venice Film Festival. So far, Ulrich Seidl has worked in theatre twice: in 2004 his piece Vater unser was premiered at the Volksbühne Berlin, and in 2009 Seidl developed and directed Böse Buben / Fiese Männer for the Munich Kammerspiele and the Wiener Festwochen, based on texts by David Foster Wallace. His photography exhibition "Paradies: Liebe Glaube Hoffnung" was shown in 2013 at BAWAG PSK Contemporary in Vienna, at C/O Berlin and as part of the Melodist International Film Festival in Kiev and the Photography Month in Bratislava.
"I love taking pictures up close and personal. Showing people exactly as they are, physically. This unadorned state is exactly where I find something like beauty." (Ulrich Seidl)
