There’s a certain intangibility to Daniel Maier-Reimer’s aesthetic practice, which takes the form of travel. From the Laplands to New Zealand, the artist has created almost fifty of these works over three decades. He often spends months alone on the road, moving mostly by foot and either orienting himself using landmarks like mountains and rivers or following geopolitical borders or city limits. The artist records his wanderings with photography, while resisting conventional tropes of the documentary format. He uses simple, analog, lightweight cameras and doesn’t see the results until he develops the film. Within the gallery, the works typically manifest as a single photograph, sometimes two. Only rarely are there more; occasionally, there are none at all. This aligns Maier-Reimer’s practice with the Conceptual tradition pioneered by stanley brouwn and Hamish Fulton, among others: the voyage as a space of individual experience that virtually eludes representation. That’s why the artist considers his images—whose deliberate desultoriness bucks the clichés of the travel genre—not “fine-art photography” but an integral part of the journey.
Maier-Reimer often further relinquishes interpretative control by entrusting the presentation of his work to others. For his solo show at Clages, he has collaborated with Mark Dion, who has staged the gallery’s foyer as a travel agency. Between shelves of brochures and guidebooks, Dion has inconspicuously integrated four of Maier-Reimer’s works: Lapland Autumn, 1990; Kaliningrad Peninsula, 2001; Tyrrhenian Sea to Adria, 2013; and Journey to Mount Etna, 2022. Maier-Reimer himself presents the same motifs again in the gallery’s other rooms, but he organizes them his own way: a single piece per room, white walls, large frames, and generous matting. This contrast, too, is all part of the artists’ collaboration. The interlacing of contexts underscores the ways in which photography transforms real places into imaginary spaces.
Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.
— Jens Asthoff