Wolfgang Oelze

Small Society for Grottoes and Caves – Part 3 – Continent Of The Unconscious
Grundbuchhalle Hamburg, November 14, 2025 to January 30, 2026

This is the third installment in an exhibition series of the same name that explores archetypal places through art. It features drawings, collages, videos, and photographs focusing on the cave as a metaphor for the hidden, grotesque, and transformative. Contemporary and historical references to the theme are combined with philosophy, art, and science.
Curated by Peter Boué and Wolfgang Oelze.

Artists: Peter Boué, Katharina Duve, Katharina Kohl, Katja Musenberg, Wolfgang Oelze, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Bernhard Prinz, Alexander Rischer, Regine Schulz, Doris Cordes-Vollert and Margit Tabel-Gerster

The exhibition is accompanied by lectures, film screenings, and discussions.

Curator Talk and Guided Tour with Peter Boué and Wolfgang Oelze, featuring the artists

Lecture by Yuning Teng, Art Historian, "Entering Another World Through the Cave: Imagery from Chinese Tradition to Mao's Revolutionary Bases and Contemporary Art Practice"

Video Premiere »Vorhöhle« by Wolfgang Oelze with Live Soundtrack by Chad Popple (Finissage)

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg und der Liebelt-Stiftung Hamburg

Finissage performance photos by Gunnar Geller

Exhibition views from Roger Loewig House – Museum and Memorial, Bad Belzig, solo exhibition, August 31 to September 28, 2025

At this historic exhibition venue, the photographs and videos unfold a spellbinding interplay of traces and premonitions. We see landscapes and caves hinting at a hidden history.

On the ground floor, a video displayed on a large wall depicts a dreamlike circular motion over terrain containing trees, pits, and brightly colored, plate-like objects. Together, these elements form a strange panorama that seems familiar yet is dominated by an eerie power.

Another video temporarily complements the permanent Roger Loewig exhibition. A slow camera movement takes viewers on a hypnotic journey from a settlement to a forest-covered, ruined village.

Large-format photographs that resemble scenes from dreamlike films expand this imagery. Here, a selection of images from the artist's collection of enchanted crypts, grottos, and caves is presented. These underground places symbolize states of being between darkness and light, despair and hope.

Since 2009, the Roger Loewig House in Bad Belzig has been dedicated to the work of the artist and poet Roger Loewig (1930–1997). After undergoing extensive renovations in 2022, the museum has expanded its offerings to include exhibitions, readings, and reflections. With the exhibition "Trap," the museum opens itself up to dialogue with contemporary art. The exhibition offers new perspectives on themes and motifs from Loewig's work, highlighting the relevance of his concerns.

The exhibition opening was accompanied by an artist talk with Prof. Dr. Kathrin Busch.

Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Falckenberg Collection: April 13 to November 3, 2019

The exhibition Fuzzy Dark Spot brings together video works by mostly Hamburg-based artists ranging from the 1970s to the present day, featuring historical and contemporary productions. The exhibition examines how video in art interprets social and media irritations and manipulations.

The fields of this investigation include references in video art to television, the educational movement of the counter-public of the 1970s, as well as the use of video as a surveillance medium, a means of artistic narrative, a psychosocial mirror, and an instrument of self-optimization in the digital present. The major impact of video images on the collective memory and consciousness in the 20th and 21st centuries makes doubts about images, the uneasiness with the familiar, as well as the distrust of truth claims important subjects of artistic reflection. The title summarizes the common theme of the works in the exhibition: a nebulous, fuzzy dark spot, place, or condition. The term Fuzzy Dark Spot comes from a discussion in an internet forum about camera lenses contaminated with mold.

The exhibition, curated by the Hamburg-based video artist Wolfgang Oelze, is programmatically linked to the exhibitions Weisser Schimmel (2010) and Capitain Pamphile (2011), which offered a look at the diverse works of artists in Hamburg within the Falckenberg Collection with specific curatorial concepts.

Part of the exhibition is an extensive supporting program with artist talks, screenings and lectures in the Falckenberg Collection as well as film screenings in the Metropolis cinema. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

Participating artists: Vito Acconci, Gabor Altorjay, John Bock, Claus Böhmler, Öyvind Fahlström, Harun Farocki, Jeanne Faust, Lee Friedlander, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, Rosanna Graf, Britta Gröne/Peter Piller, Romeo Grünfelder, Christian Jankowski, Volko Kamensky, Naho Kawabe, Mike Kelley, Jon Kessler, Nina Könnemann, Till Krause, Vlado Kristl, Lene Markusen, Paul McCarthy, Aurelia Mihai, Ernst Mitzka, Vanessa Nica Mueller, Karina Nimmerfall, Wolfgang Oelze, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Stefan Panhans Rotraut Pape/Raskin, reproducts, Rainer Korsen/Gerd Roscher, Oliver Ross, Gerhard Rühm, Swen Erik Scheuerling, Corinna Schnitt, Paul Spengemann, Hans Stützer, Mike Mandel/Larry Sultan, Inga Svala Thorsdottir, Helena Wittmann, and Steffen Zillig

In extension to the exhibition, the Falckenberg collection shows a curated video loop, the Fuzzy Sequence – presenting works by nine Hamburg artists: Goesta Diercks, Cordula Ditz, Jens Franke, Annika Kahrs, Georg Kühn, Matthias Meyer, Axel Schäffler, Eske Schlüters and Tilman Walther

https://www.sammlung-falckenberg.de/ausstellungen/fuzzy-dark-spot-videokunst-aus-hamburg

Exhibition photos by Henning Rogge

exhibition in Oel-Früh Cabinet, Hamburg, on occasion of the Triennial of Photography, 2018
Exhibition views with three photos by Antje Sauer / RAL 4001

Light Box, 170 x 125 cm

take a closer look at the photo

exhibition XXII in Oel-Früh Cabinet, 2016
Exhibition views

Photographs, Installation
slide projection, two-sided trapezoidal mirror and soundtrack
Oel-Früh Cabinet, Hamburg
– one additional image appeared as exhibition invite

view the list of works

Experimental Arts International Festival, Bilbao, 2016
exhibition and performance of “Beat Box”
with Miguel A. García (guitar) and Maria Seco López (bass guitar)

2025 “Un autre territoire des écarts”, video installation, Traverse Vidéo, Toulouse, France (catalogue text in French / English / German)

2024 “Ice Cream for Crow” (video), Adamski Gallery, Berlin

2024 Expanded Media group exhibition at “37. Stuttgarter Filmwinter” (video), Stuttgart

2022 “Kleine Gesellschaft für Gotten und Höhlen, Teil 2” (video), Hamburg

2021 “Kleine Gesellschaft für Weg und Umweg”, Hamburg (with a.o., Peter Boué, Alexander Rischer, Michael Buck, Micha Mohr, Simon Hehemann - l.t.r.)

2020 “Der Apparat”, Frappant Gallery, Hamburg

2010 “Photography – Ideology of representation”, Gallery Melike Bilir, Hamburg

2013 “und Hamburg was glaubst du”, Kunsthaus Hamburg

2010 “Leshan Invitational Contemporary Art Exhibition” (video), Leshan, China (catalog excerpt)

2012 “Daemon's Dilemma” (video), Künstlerhaus Frise, Hamburg

2011 “Fuzzy Dark Spot”, Raum für Zweckfreiheit, Berlin *

* Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg