Olaf Wipperfürth
                         
studio | atelier                    

The exhibition was supported by the Roma Cultura art board and the German Embassy in Rome.
Curator: Valentina Ciarallo Project organisation: WIB milano, Mario Rescio and Sergio Saladino.

In summer 2019, the german artist and filmmaker, Olaf Wipperfürth, traveled to Greenland ( Disko bay ) to take photographs for an ongoing series on fragile enviroments. He realized that the sublime landscapes were difficult to describe with photography alone. This difficulty drove the artist to further mutate his photographic prints by adding free- floating spontaneous forms and layers of abstraction with paint.
Here, Disko Bay takes place: halfway between photography and painting, through multiple layers of photographic transformations by photographing, repainting and photographing again. He learned that each iceberg had its own personality; and that every image needed to be seen individually, like a person, The melting lines that appear when they slowly lift from the water, leave graphic marks in their sides, like scars. One could read this work as a gesture of repairing and conservation, as a protective veil draped over the slowly melting icebergs.
Olaf Wipperfürth aims to reach a certain point of dimensional shift, a certain kind of absence; a metamorphosis through imagination creating new landscapes of singularity.
The disapperance of the arctic ice sheets mirrors the complex and catastrophic changes. Ice is the geological memory of ourplanet’s history and development. As the ice vanishes, we lose this memory. This work draws awareness to this fragile environment and the disappearance of incarnated memories.