Adrian Sauer

“Photographs are continually sought as evidence, which is why they get manipulated or used in a manipulative context. Digitisation adds new complexity to these circumstances. And a new simplicity. It is these opposites that have always characterised the medium.” Adrian Sauer, 2020

  • SONGS OF THE SKY, Photography & the Cloud, 2021, C/O Berlin

  • RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain, 2021, DZ Bank Kunstsammlung, Frankfurt

  • RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain, 2021, DZ Bank Kunstsammlung, Frankfurt

  • Foto Arbeiten, 2020, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg

  • Foto Arbeiten, 2020, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg

  • Foto Arbeiten, 2020, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg

  • Foto Arbeiten, 2020, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg

  • Foto Arbeiten, 2020, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg

  • On the Languages of Photography – A Suggestion, 2019, Sanaa Building Folkwang-University, Essen

  • On the Languages of Photography – A Suggestion, 2019, Sanaa Building Folkwang-University, Essen

  • On the Languages of Photography – A Suggestion, 2019, Sanaa Building Folkwang-University, Essen

  • On the Languages of Photography – A Suggestion, 2019, Sanaa Building Folkwang-University, Essen

  • Spektren, 2019, Museum im Kleinhues-Bau, Kornwestheim

  • Spektren, 2019, Museum im Kleinhues-Bau, Kornwestheim

  • DAS BAUHAUS #ITSALLDESIGN, 2018, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn / Photo: Bernd Lammel (c) Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH

  • DAS BAUHAUS #ITSALLDESIGN, 2018, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn / Photo: Bernd Lammel (c) Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH

  • Pasquart Photoforum, 2018, Kunstverein Biel, Bienne

  • Pasquart Photoforum, 2018, Kunstverein Biel, Bienne

  • Form und Farbe, 2014, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • Form und Farbe, 2014, Klemm’s, Berlin

About the artist

An essential constituent in Adrian Sauer’s work is the conception of photography in the digital age in regard to materiality, culture and purpose.
His works are designated by a unique and idiosyncratic appearance oscillating between hyperrealism and simultaneously an apparently unreal surface. Sauer’s vantage point is always the permeation of phenomena in our visual and material culture. He herewith uses very precisely the different possibilities of image- making for the respective object of his photographic interest.

Like no other artist of his generation, Adrian Sauer questions the possibilities of analogue and digital photography. He examines and deconstructs the modes of representation of digital image production, thereby exposing the photographic image as a mere construction. The focus is on the technological basis of photography, caused by the radical change of the last 30 years, which fundamentally changes the photographic process.

This is where Sauer comes in by fragmenting the process of image production, creating insights into individual elements. His conceptual approach allows for a complete new understanding of the image, which no longer deals with the exhibition wall as such, but approaches other disciplines by subversively undermining the photographic image and digital technology.

“While some of his works are dedicated to the semantic and pragmatic dimension of image usage – how images are used and read within a certain context – his main interest lies in the ‘morphology’ of the digital image, his ‘form theory’”. Florian Ebner, Centre Pompidou, 2014

Adrian Sauer on his exhibition Abstraction Layers and artistic practice, 2022

Publications