Publisher's Synopsis
Detlef Orlopp (*1937) began his apprenticeship as a photographer in 1955, and today, some seventy years later, he can look back on an impressive oeuvre. Until 1973, Detlef Orlopp held a professorship at the Werkkunstschule in Krefeld. In 2015, the Folkwang Museum in Essen acquired a significant part of his estate. Fully committed to analog black-and-white photography, the artist " paints" with light, structure, line and shading in the thematic field of landscapes and portraits. He selects for example sections of the earth' s surface and conceals their representational origin, and reduces their expansiveness to the perspectival depth of the picture surface. The absence of any comparative scale leads to a pictorial reorganization that, in its degree of abstraction, results in a formal autonomy. Detlef Orlopp' s landscape excerpts are timeless and spaceless abstractions that have been transformed into structural pictorial elements. As such, he positions himself in twentieth-century modernism. The tachism of Wols, the " all-over" structure of Jackson Pollock' s drippings, and the gestural style of Hans Hartung. The booklet is the first to include works from his glacier series.
