Artificial Romanticism
2023 - today
In his latest project, Maximilian Brunn transforms AI-generated images into physical photographic prints using a technique from the 19th century. The prints are ‘promptographies’ (images created digitally by entering text), which show black and white landscape scenes of non-existent places.
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Paintings by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) serve as a model for the ‘Artificial Romanticism’ group of works. Based on Friedrich’s compositions and choice of subject, Brunn reinterprets the paintings in the style of classical landscape photography in a sequence of successive AI tools, removing all human and civilisational traces. Detached from such references, the landscapes float in an unclear temporal space that could be categorised as either prehistoric or post-apocalyptic.
In his working method, Friedrich created sketches of scenes that he discovered on his travels in order to later bring them together in paintings according to his own compositional ideas. The way today’s AI tools work to generate images follows a similar principle: millions of photographs taken around the world are merged by entering text. Brunn utilises this dynamic to open up a new perspective on nature, which, similar to Friedrich’s working method, is based on reality but does not explicitly depict it.
Places of Worship
2020 - today
In this series, Brunn captures places of worship, which are the oldest remaining structures on earth, in hopes of understanding humanity’s relationship with its timeless nature.
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Inspired by Carl Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious, which refer to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts, the artist seeks to capture humanity’s collective memories through the five world religions. The Dharmic and Abrahamic Religions are shown in groups of five, installed from left to right according to their respective time of inception: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. With a strictly center aligned perspective, Maximilian uncovers the symmetry of each structure and its deities.
Following the tradition of Prussian church photographers, Brunn uses an 8 x 10-inch plate camera, from whose negatives he produces handmade contact prints for a lossless way to the image. Wanting to reflect the concept of timelessness in his photographic prints, he utilizes the 19th century technique of platinum/palladium printing, which offers the most archivally stable printing process. Prints created using this technique can last for over a thousand years without any loss of quality. The product of this printing process transforms a moment captured into a more everlasting, timeless object.
Untouched Landscapes
2018 - 2020
Places seemingly untouched by human hands, photographed between 2018 and 2020 in Japan and New Zealand. The aim was to show landscapes that cannot be attributed to a clear point in time, and might have existed several thousand years in the past as well as in the future.
