Holger Obenaus

Holger Obenaus is a German photographer, musician and songwriter, born in 1964. He began his artistic career as a young punk guitar player in the late 1970s and early 1980s, feeding off the ebullient and fertile environs of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Kölner Werkschule, a scene of electronic music, German pop and punk, ZERO, Fluxus and Beuys's Erweiterter Kunstbegriff, where at night artists and musicians turned underground bars into canvases and studios into nightclubs. He recalls it as a never-ending artistic discourse of new ideas and concepts. The producer Conny Plank, Kraftwerk, and artists such as Jürgen Klauke, Gerhard Richter and Boris Becker were formative influences that still define his work.

In the 1990s and early 2000s Obenaus became one of the most successful songwriters in Germany, earning numerous Gold and Multi-Platinum awards from the German music industry. Despite this commercial success he felt he had reached an impasse in his expression. In his words, a simple shift of frequency was the inevitable step to expand his artistic vocabulary, and a change of location its logical consequence: from music to photography, from Europe to the United States, back to the roots.

Photography proved the perfect tool. His commercial body of work, with its distinctive, dispassionate perspective and idealistic point of view, is closely aligned with the Düsseldorf School of Photography and the teachings of Bernd and Hilla Becher. In the 2010s his signature look came to be regarded by publishers, architects and clients as the epitome of German photography and produced an extensive commercial portfolio that includes over fifty national covers.

Commercial success does not necessarily breed artistic freedom, and again his creative spirit demanded more room for self-expression, a move from reproduction to production. In 2020 Obenaus perfected a symbiosis of large format cameras, radioactive lenses and digital technology. The resulting abstract photographs move photography from a repetitive process of replication to a creative act of production: expressionistic impressions with little or no reference to reality, without shadows, three-dimensionality or figurative inference.