Over four years and seasons, Loredana Nemes has photographed the beech trees that are characteristic of the landscape above the chalk cliffs of the island of Rügen, made famous in art and history. What began as a relaxing walk has turned into an impressive, long-term photographic observation of this “forest seascape.” The pictures she has produced are of an ancient, archaic landscape that has survived for many generations and will continue to survive over many more in the future. They capture the quiet, the beauty, the robustness, and the fragility of the beeches set against the backdrop of the smooth, timeless horizon above the sea; and the magic of fog, light, clouds, snow, and the seasons of the year. At the same time, however, they also convey a sense of both ephemerality and hazard, because the forests are at the mercy of climate change. Perhaps the beeches at the Königsstuhl remind Loredana Nemes of the forests in Romania’s Carpathian mountains, where she hiked as a child with her father, and this explains the profound emotion expressed in her photographs? At any rate, the beeches on Rügen are linked to the beeches in the Carpathians, for they are all part of a UNESCO natural world heritage site, the “ancient and primeval beech forests in the Carpathians and other European regions.”

Born in Romania in 1972, Loredana Nemes first studied German and Mathematics in Aachen before turning exclusively to photography as an autodidact in 2001. Since then she lives in Berlin and works on photographic series, which she develops over a longer period of time. Nemes' approach is not scientifically cool, but emotionally sensitive. Her photographs captivate not only through the authenticity of their depiction, but also through their artistic visual language, for Nemes seeks a suitable form of photographic expression for each cycle. She constantly questions the medium of photography, its limits and possibilities, and adapts them to the themes of her work: Identity, gender, cultural differences and emotions such as greed, fear, love. The last three culminated in a large solo exhibition of the same name, which Loredana Nemes showed at the Museum Berlinische Galerie in 2018 and in which the artist for the first time presented abstract works as well as her own texts in addition to her portrait photographs.