FLORIAN MAIER-AICHEN describes himself as a ''painter-photographer''. To him photography isn't the end result but the starting point of his artistic examination. The photographic image as an opportunity to produce a compositional vision just as precise and creative as a painting or a drawing: this approach connects FLORIAN MAIER-AICHEN to Heinrich Kühn (1866 – 1944) who is considered to be the founder of international artistic photography in 1900. As a representative of pictorialism Kühn combined photography and painting by creating the frst colour photography called autochrome. Pioneering landscape photography were the French Bisson brothers who frst captured high mountain ranges (Mont Blanc massif), Gustave le Gray who was the frst to photograph the sea and Carleton Watkins who took the frst pictures of Yosemite valley. To this day the work of these 19th century photographers is a source of inspiration and a role model to FLORIAN MAIER-AICHEN. For Watercolour, 418 feet the artist chose the exact same position as Carleton Watkins did in 1861, an homage to his predecessor. The waterfall shimmers in all the colours of the rainbow, an ultraviolet illusory world unfolds.

FLORIAN MAIER-AICHEN works exclusively with an analogue large format camera. By using digital distortion techniques, the artist incorporates fctional elements into his works to free them from the status of the hyper realistic medium. Since MAIER-AICHEN does not work serial, he chooses an individual size for each photograph and the appropriate presentation (c-print, dye transfer print, gelatin silver print). To add to the viewer's irritation, the artist may use an expired film, then an infrared flm: in Untitled, 2019 the red colourations mark the location of organic matter. The discolouration makes the Pacific coast south of Monterey look extraordinary and enigmatic. The artist likes to think that his landscapes can be read like maps and are therefore developed in corresponding dimensions. The exhibition's Seascapes are inspired by Gustave le Gray, who already used diferent negatives for sky and foreground in the 19th century to avoid any blurring in his work. This trick and the technicolour tinge of the water make the image look unreal and detached (Untitled, Sunset #2).

Florian Maier-Aichen