Thomas Wrede

What looks like the representation of a football field in a dramatic Caspar David Friedrichesque mountainous setting, in the midst of night, on second glance becomes a humorous questioning of our long constructed perceptions of reality and in relation, the image itself. Thomas Wrede's perspective and humorous edit of the landscape on its most basic level represents a mirror for our dreams, wishes and yearnings. His landscapes, places and stories on second glance make no sense at all and cannot really exist. Thus Wrede's work humorously unmasks our constructions of perception and landscape by showing us a kind of concentrate or hyper simulacrum.

On closer inspection Wrede's monumental depictions are an assembly of different realities. Wrede's world is usually photographed half a metre above ground level. What appears as an endless ocean or a monumental mountain most often is "just" a puddle or a heap of sand on one of the endless beaches in Northern Germany or an old coal-mining field in Laussitz, Germany. With the help of model cars and parts of the model railway assembly kits, Wrede stages a kind of film set for the viewer to contemplate his or her perception. The irony to find the ocean in a puddle kind of brings Thomas Wrede's questioning of our reality perception and motifs of yearning or longing to a culmination.

Once one has uncovered Thomas Wrede's process of working, the way one views his landscape from an artistic perspective also changes. One moves from the classic landscape photograph reticent of a Caspar David Friedrich-like construction of the image to a work in progress, a staging of a set, like Thomas Demand's built and photographed paper worlds. Like Demand's, Wrede's images also always seem to tell a story. This, along with other formal concerns, moves Thomas Wrede's photographs back into the world of painters such as Edward Hopper.