NILS-UDO
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
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C.V.
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PUBLICATIONS
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ADDITIONAL CONTEXT
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WORKS
Selection
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
Creativity has something to do with conscious modifications, with an engagement to the present. And in order to maintain the allure of the nudes to future generations, they have to be enduring. A painting or a sculpture is finished when the artists signs it and resigns from altering it for good – this is he idea at any rate. Thereafter the work should be unaltered and, if possible, everlasting. This ideal eternity antagonizes nature, which is forever in motion and constantly transforming itself. The artists of the Renaissance saw themselves as students of nature. But, in those days, it was required that a student would one day best his master teacher. The euphoria of everlasting advancement was that every future generation should outdo the former and thereby continually learn how to control nature. Being better than nature, and ultimately making her a subject, is also a biblical belief. Paired with the age-old dream of the fountain of youth, this leads to fatal results, which are ever-present all around us. The artist Nils-Udo has exceedingly discarded these artistic concepts, most likely because he occasionally moved an enriching distance away from our occidental civilization. His work embodies the humility and in comparison to the fundamentals of life. The art historian Dieter Ronte once said, “ The artistic fantasy envisions nature. It doesn’t destroy like when man intervenes with nature.” Nils Udo rises to nature in that he accepts its laws of transience and change. In 1972 he gave up painting, which he had practicing in Paris for a decade, and began renting land from farmers in order to carry out his plantations and excavations. With the borrowed natural materials he created nests, curtains and rafts, purely to photograph them as evidence of their ephemeral existence. This second step of photographing his creations, bestows his works with a permanence. However, this conservation also includes the alterations of nature. This apparent paradox is, upon closer inspection, a natural law. The eternalness doesn’t lie in the unalterable, but in the constant renewal. Nils Udo’s photography is not purely documentary, but more so a creation of its own reality. It abstracts, it reduces temperature, aesthetic, time, space and the tactile to the two-dimensional. It compacts the elusive natural creation and concentrates on it, unleashing itself in the eye of the viewer: “The sensation is omnipresent.”
