Simone Nieweg – Plantings, Sheds, Farmland. About working In nature, until January 21, 2024
“You have to hurry if you want to see something, everything disappears,” this quote from the French impressionist Paul Cézanne, nourished by experience, also applies to the work of the photographer Simone Nieweg (*1962). For the artist, who emerged as a master student from Bernd Becher's class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, the view of nature and the areas made usable by humans were already important starting points for her artistic work in the 1980s. Even back then, they were concerned with pressing questions about how to use our natural resources. With her color photographs, which she takes with a large-format camera in the Rhineland, in several regions of Germany and in France, she draws attention to the often overlooked outskirts of our towns and industrial areas and shows the aesthetics that arise when these as yet unplanned areas are limited, usually on her own initiative be used for horticultural or agricultural purposes. The artist captures what gives the country structure and continuity: alternative allotments, grave land, patches of meadow, fields becoming wild, vegetable patches, plowed fields in winter or flowering fruit trees as harbingers of spring. Buildings built with simple means, be they sheds or compost racks, can also be discovered as typical elements of their landscapes.