"Andrea Wilmsen’s photographs do not always reveal what kind of room we are looking at - or, for that matter, if it is a room at all. The German photographer, currently based in Berlin and Chicago, challenges viewers with her images of absolutely intimate yet very public spaces in museums. She frequently focuses on details or approaches empty walls so closely that we are sometimes led to believe that we are looking at an abstract or nonfigurative photograph.

 (…)  For her current project she photographed the exhibition rooms of the Bode-Museum on the Museum Island in Berlin from constantly new perspectives, although her goal was not to reproduce art. On the contrary, as an experiment in exploring our basic perception of spaces, she focused on the immediate surroundings of sculptures and paintings, whose edges sometimes extend into the images. She is not interested in the Bode-Museum as a tangible, representative space or the important artworks that are exhibited there, but rather the museum space in general, as a stage for certain objects that by being presented and contextualized there become museum pieces .(…)"

Matthias Harder

Art historian, head curator and director,

Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin