Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

MonoVisions Black & White Photo Contest 2024

For many years Michael Kenna has been traveling around the world and keeps on revisiting the same places. He understands these places as “friends” and is fostering these relationships to his old “friends” instead of making new, superficial ones. Just as he is revisiting places he repeats certain elements in the images. A moving star sky, wavering clouds or diffuse sky, lonely trees, mystical patches of fogs, peers at lakes or seas belong to these elements. His images are based on the landscapes; however, they are captured in geometrical compositions of lines and surfaces, whereby their natural character is transformed into a less relatively non-natural environment. Thus he creates a contrast between movements and stillness, far and near, construction and chaos, moment and cumulative time. In the tradition of romanticism he seems to follow his idol Caspar David Friedrich representing human states of mind such as solitude and melancholia and proposing questions about transience and infinity.

In his photographs one can feel the magical aura that captivates by its powerful silence the viewer. When Kenna was a child he wants to become a priest, now, he conveys serenity and contemplation by his images that challenge the dimensions of time and space.

Michael Kenna
Between Mountains & Lakes
15 Aug – 3 Oct 2015

Bernheimer Fine Art
Haldenstr. 11
6006 Luzern
www.bernheimer.ch

Pine Trees, Wolcheon, Gangwando, South Korea, 2007

Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

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Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

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Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

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Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

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Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

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Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

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Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

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Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

Morning Calm, Jeung-do, Shinan, South Korea, 2012

Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes

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Michael Kenna: Between Mountains & Lakes


MonoVisions Black & White Photo Contest 2024