Andrej Pirrwitz

Colours of Soundlessness

Spätkapitalistische Ruinen

Studying Andrej Pirrwitz’s (b. Dresden, 1963) photographs, we can never be entirely certain where he took them. Is the artist revisiting the rational industrial architecture of a past era of maximum production? Or is he already picturing the ruins of our own late-capitalist world? His works use time exposures to blur the line between recent history and contemporary reality. With a painter’s flair for composition—Pirrwitz studied painting—he displaces furniture, filing cabinets, and other leftovers at the desolate scenes that are his motifs. His shots exude a ghostly calm that is sharply at odds with our fast-paced present. The demise of a failed order or the long-desired dawn of a new age? That is in the eye of the beholder. With an essay by Christoph Tannert.