Vera Fles-Schönegge and Klaus Philipp at the Atelierhaus Darmstadt
Landscapes are photographed and shared millions of times today – often in iconic locations and within seconds. So why another art exhibition on this topic?
The exhibition at the Atelierhaus Darmstadt offers a slower, more focused response: The painter Vera Fles-Schönegge and the photographer Klaus Philipp juxtapose their works, showcasing two artistic positions that confront the flood of images with deliberation, reduction, and inner concentration.
Both artists have been working with landscape depictions for many years. Despite their different media, they share a similar approach: sensing and exploring mental spaces that lie beyond the visible. Their works forgo documentary accuracy in favor of the elemental and iconic – open to associations of vastness, stillness, and inner movement. A finely differentiated, tonal palette characterizes their work, as do formal reduction and abstraction.
Klaus Philipp 's photography moves between nature study and artistic transformation. Through targeted manipulation, he creates ethereal, sometimes supernatural atmospheres with graphic power. His images avoid both condemnation and idyllic depictions, instead making visible both the human impact on the landscape and its moments of sublimity and untouched beauty. Light phenomena and natural forces play a central role in his work. This perspective is driven by a longing for preservation—of nature as well as of humanity's inner connection to it.
Vera Fles-Schönegge approaches landscapes through the painting process itself, without reference to specific locations. Her starting point is an interplay between deliberate composition and chance, from which structures gradually emerge. Her paintings are characterized by a significant reduction of representational elements and avoid unambiguous messages. Orientation is provided by a few key features – primarily by striking lines that define the horizon, separating earth and sky and lending the image space and tension.
The exhibition brings two different visual media into a fruitful dialogue, thus expanding the discourse on the representation of landscape in the contemporary art context.
Info block:
- Sensed & Explored. Landscape. Painting. Photography
- Atelierhaus Darmstadt, Riedeselstraße 15
- March 20 to April 7, 2026
- Opening: March 20, 2026, 7 p.m.
- Opening hours: Fri 4–7 pm, Sat & Sun 11 am–5 pm
