Roland Fischer | Night and Day

ROLAND FISCHER | NIGHT AND DAY

Roland Fischer, among the most prominent voices in German photography today, has completed a new portfolio with Durham Press. Titled Night and Day, the portfolio of twelve works in an edition of forty-four depicting abstracted architecture are the first woodblock prints the artist has created with the Press.

Renowned for his large-format photographs of buildings in locales ranging from his adopted hometowns of Munich and Beijing to cities across the world, Fischer produces detailed views of modern and contemporary architecture. He often captures facades up close, transforming them into abstracted, flattened patterns. His images emphasize each structure’s distinctive qualities while simultaneously calling attention to the homogenizing impact of globalization. Without the context of a skyline or geographic elements, many of these pictures conceivably could have been taken in almost any metropolis in the world.

Night and Day is a new extension of this photographic work both in concept and medium. Rather than depict existing buildings, the portfolio presents a collection of imagined constructions and reconstructions. The artist extracted shapes and lines from various images he has accumulated during his travels and used these as the basis for series of new compositions. While the resulting prints can be read as hard-edge and purely geometric, the viewer can also imagine them as architectural forms: one might be a section of a modernist grid, others a curving staircase reminiscent of Zaha Hadid’s, or others an undulating roofline designed by Herzog & de Meuron.