Ad Infinitum

ARTIST STATEMENT

In 2018, I travelled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to visit a friend. Together, we made a two-day journey to Santa Fe, where we visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Among the works of this exceptional artist, I encountered Alfred Stieglitz’s seminal series Equivalents for the first time, in its original gelatin silver prints. I was deeply struck by them.

On our drive back through the vast, deserted landscapes of New Mexico, something extraordinary happened. Suddenly, a huge yak appeared beside the road. I had never seen a yak in the wild before, and I was overwhelmed by its presence and beauty.

He blew through his nostrils and scraped his hooves against the ground. I could sense his immense strength. I stood still for a long time, my camera in my hands, and began to speak to him. The yak looked directly into my eyes, and I had the feeling that he gradually began to relax. Then I took the photograph. It remains one of the most magical encounters of my life.

A few weeks later, back in Austria and working in my studio, I looked out of the window. There, unexpectedly, stood a beautiful deer in the field. Once again, I felt that immediate excitement. I opened the window, took my camera, and began speaking to this extraordinary being. The deer returned my gaze. In that moment, I captured the second image.

I love bringing these two encounters together as a diptych. They hold a tension between softness and strength, stillness and presence, distance and intimacy. Beyond this contrast, however, the two images speak of something more fundamental: a moment of recognition between two forms of life.

For me, these encounters opened a space in which the boundaries between human and animal, observer and observed, seemed to momentarily dissolve. They became moments of profound connection—with another living being, with the world we share, and with the extraordinary and miraculous forms of existence that surround us.