The core topics of Dieter Appelt’s (b. 1935) often archaic-looking black-and-white photographs are the existential themes of birth, life, time, pain, and death. He is concerned with the relationship between humans and nature, inner life and perception – ‘traces of memory’, as the title of one sequence is called.

The exhibition brings together works from various phases of the artist’s oeuvre: works that bear the influence of Joseph Beuys and his action art – although in Appelt’s case without an audience and for the most part as an orchestration using his own body – and later works in which he relied on experiments in camera technique such as long-term and multiple exposure and incorporated camera-less image processes such as the photogram and montage into his autonomous image creations. Several tableaux and individual pieces form the spectrum of his photographic work.

The exhibition commemorating Dieter Appelt’s 90th birthday is a tribute to the universal artist, who was appointed professor of photography, film, and video at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1982 and became its vice president from 1999 until his retirement in 2000.