Peter Unter­mai­er­ho­fer: Lost Places

With his third exhi­bi­tion in the Gal­lery for Con­tem­porary Pho­to­gra­phy, Peter Unter­mai­er­ho­fer once again pres­ents a jour­ney into the past in which the for­mer sple­ndor of for­got­ten archi­tec­tu­ral monu­ments is cele­bra­ted. Many of the 16 collec­ted fine art prints are being shown for the first time as part of an exhi­bi­tion and mainly come from the artist’s last voya­ges of dis­co­very to Bel­gium, Ger­many, France and Italy bet­ween 2019 and 2023.

“Lost Pla­ces – The Gran­deur of Decay” is an invi­ta­tion to the viewer to explore the past sple­ndor of aban­do­ned cast­les and vil­las, magni­fi­cent thea­ters, anci­ent ther­mal baths, mys­te­rious sana­to­ri­ums and hid­den libra­ries that are doo­med to col­lapse. The for­mer beauty of these archi­tec­tu­ral crea­ti­ons is revea­led in artistic details and fili­gree deco­ra­ti­ons, having retai­ned their grace even in their ruined state. Each of these deco­ra­tive ele­ments bears wit­ness to an era in which con­struc­tion and crafts­manship reached their peak.
In the midst of silence and decay, Unter­mai­er­ho­fer explo­res the uni­ver­sal ques­tion of human tran­si­ence: What remains of us when time has pas­sed us by? In view of the eerily beau­ti­ful sce­nes pre­ser­ved by the artist in the pic­ture, it beco­mes clear that it‘s pre­ci­sely these cra­cked old walls that bring the memo­ries of a per­son or family back to life and con­front us with our own fini­ten­ess.
Untermaierhofer’s pho­to­gra­phic works evoke that indif­fe­rent atmo­s­phere in which the boun­dary line bet­ween past and pre­sent blurs, in which past epochs wait to be redis­co­vered in order to reveal the fading tra­ces of time. The viewer embarks on a jour­ney through the past, where every ruin tells of its sad fate, every archi­tec­tu­ral detail reve­als its own world and hid­den tre­a­su­res inside aban­do­ned cast­les wait like time cap­su­les to be redis­co­vered. Behind each of the sce­nes there‘s a secret, an echo of days gone by that igni­tes the ima­gi­na­tion and takes you into a lost world.