Strange Days

Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler

Ute Mahler (born 1949) and Werner Mahler (born 1950) were key figures of East German photography; after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they founded the Ostkreuz Agency and the Ostkreuz School of Photography in Berlin. In summer 2014, Hamburg’s House of Photographydevoted a large retrospective exhibition titled Work Show to the married couple and presented their latest joint project Strange Days for the first time. Robert Morat Gallery is pleased to show this recent series in Berlin.
Strange Days, a series of large landscape studies, is an expedition into well-known territory. The couple travelled through Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Lower Saxony in a search for moments with an ambiguous quality. Some of their statements: ‘We were looking for the unexpected.’ ‘Over the years we noticed that we’ve encountered images that were strange, whose mystery could not be solved.’ ‘Very simply put,’ say Ute and Werner Mahler, ‘they are the kind of situations that you want to tell your partner about when you get home at night!’