Torsten Warmuth

Life

After graduating from school in Erfurt, he completed a degree in science and a doctorate in computer-aided mathematics at the University of Kassel in 1995. As from 1996, Warmuth decided against an academic career and dedicated himself exclusively to photography.

Art

Torsten Warmuth’s photographs focus on man’s anonymity in an urban environment. He sees the modern city as a backdrop to fragile moments and fleeting constellations. Early series like New Walk (1998) or Stadtwolf / Citywolf (2000) already document Warmuth’s predilection for photographic experiment. His photographically produced works are sharply focused, but nevertheless full of optical hazes and substantial uncertainties. Using long and multiple exposures, he attempts to convey the impression that his figures are elongating or even beginning to dissolve and disappear.

The photo historian Enno Kaufhold therefore sees in Warmuth’s images a merging of different moments that "actually take place in different places and at different times. And by means of longer exposure times these moments are shown in their continuum rather than as fixed, short fragments".

In recent years, cities like Buenos Aires, Cairo or New York City have provided the motifs for Warmuth's works. In the magazine Photonews, for instance, Ralf Hanselle wrote about the series It’s a Man’s World (2007), made in Cairo: "Like the great flàneur of the fin de siècle, Torsten Warmuth roves the stony urban wastes like a man engaged in an optical expedition. Like them, he understands urban space as modernity’s extreme." Warmuth received the Kunstpreis Fotografie 2008, endowed by the Lotto GmbH Land Brandenburg, for his cycle It's a Man's World.

In 2009, Warmuth developed his technique of "Silver Painting". Besides the use of light, here he also paints a wide range of toners onto the silver gelatin paper by hand. The processes employed are confined to analogue techniques. This manual approach means that he creates only unique works. Silver painting differs from photography decisively as a consequence of its unique, non-reproducible quality and painterly effect. These predominantly large-format, multi-toned silver gelatin prints are always produced manually by the artist, using classical analogue darkroom techniques.

Since 2012, he has been producing colour works, leading to new levels of abstraction and expression – the origination of Elusionistic Art.

Elusionistic Art

Images that cannot be taken directly by the camera or seen by the human eye … A thought, an idea; an image that only develops after it has been recorded photographically, albeit through that very act … Something that expands our view of the world, our awareness, the space for association … Corresponding far more to fiction than to reporting: Let us call it Elusionistic Art.

Elusionism [Lat. eludere / Engl. elude – evade, escape, avoid; Engl. elusive – fleeting, difficult to grasp, evading]

Exhibitions

Literature

Filmography