Studies in Falling Helene Schmitz 08.11.2024 > 08.01.2025

Presentation

Helene Schmitz

The title of Swedish photographer Helene Schmitz’s exhibition, Studies in Falling, is anything but univocal. In English and in French alike, the verb to fall —chuter— refers to the physical act of descending as well as a condition of detachment from one’s natural medium and, metaphorically, the entering in a state of degradation. In Judeo-Christian culture, the term fall —chute— refers to the exile of humankind from paradise. From the get-go, Studies in Falling thus conveys a meeting of multiple topics, simultaneously pragmatic, symbolic, and transcendent.

Inspired by the 1818 painting Chalk Cliffs on Rügen by the figurehead of German Romanticism Caspar David Friedrich, Helene Schmitz went to the island of Rügen itself, facing Germany’s North coast in today’s Jasmund National Park.

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With the series of photographs Studies in Falling, Helene Schmitz chose to reverse the point of view and to be facing the location of Friedrich’s protagonists. From a boat, she photographed the cliffs, this great hilly wall of limestone edged with a dense birch forest. By changing perspectives, not only does Helene Schmitz echo the undeniable beauty of the place, but she also ponders over the materiality created by the invisible meeting between the sky, the sea, and the land —terra not so firma. In Seen from Here, the precarity of the landscape is tangible: the ongoing process of erosion can be seen through the wall of limestone as well as several trees threatening to fall.