Origo

Born in 1965 in the former GDR, Bernd Weingart spent his early years in Ohrdruf. Since the 1990s, he has lived and worked in Berlin. In 1992, he was awarded the Photography Promotion Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Raised in a house that combined a bookbinding workshop, a framing studio, and a gallery, Weingart early on discovered the alluring materiality of things. Equally formative were the light and the soft, misty atmosphere of the landscape of his origins - impressions that continue to resonate throughout his work.

Exploring his inner world in relation to visible reality, alongside a profound engagement with the history of art, forms the foundation of Weingart’s work. Subtle impressions from his childhood permeate his practice, lending it depth and an intuitive transparency. In the triptychs Lemusichs Garden, he visualized, in thirty-six variations, central conceptual figures derived from hermetic texts, thereby condensing his engagement with symbolic and philosophical visual language.

Already in the early 2000s, Weingart repeatedly retreated to the solitude and stillness of the Landscapes of his youth to capture the recurrent experience of a particular feeling, which he designates as numinos. In the 2010s, he increasingly turned to nocturnal photography: in the series Nocturnes, he documents the subtle atmospheres of the nighttime urban landscape, interpreting them as expressions of inner laws and ideas. In the series Whispering Vaults, Weingart renders visible the environments of a fading 1980s world and the existence of an isolated bohemian milieu, asserting itself in provincial life.