INTERVIEW WITH MARKUS AMBACH

Markus Ambach, born in 1963, is a versatile exhibition maker, curator, and artist. After studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he founded the project platform MAP in 2002. In collaboration with cities, museums, and urban stakeholders, MAP realizes international, context-specific art projects in urban spaces. Ambach's works, such as B1A40 The Beauty of the Great Road and From Foreign Lands in Our Own Cities, reflect the relationship between art, society, and urbanity. In addition to his artistic activities, he is also politically engaged, including advocating for the establishment of an art commission in Düsseldorf.

In an interview with Hatje Cantz, Markus Ambach talks about his approach to Caspar David Friedrich and the insights gained from Friedrich's works for his own artistic creations.

Hatje Cantz: Have you ever experienced a very personal "Friedrich moment" in your life that you would like to share with us?

Markus Ambach: As a young artist, not exactly thrilled by Friedrich's ostensibly realistic aesthetic, I was forced to give a presentation on him in art history and, in doing so, had to engage with the content hidden beneath the surface of his work. This was a key moment where I first recognized the crucial importance of contextualizing artistic work within its current and historical, political and social environment – a principle that remains central to my work today. Furthermore, in engaging with Friedrich, art history revealed itself to me as the context, background, and home of all artistic work. The hidden thematic cosmos in politically and religiously significant paintings like the Tetschen Altar or the Monk by the Sea showed how socially impactful a painting can be. Friedrich's collage technique pointed to the deceptions one falls for if one doesn't delve deeply into the syntax of artistic works, and at the same time, to the opportunity to artistically utilize subtle ambiguities. All factors that were important for a young artist.

HC: Can you tell us which elements from Friedrich's work you have incorporated into your own artworks and what role they play in your artistic practice?

MA: Initially, there were works in which theatrically staged landscape sequences played a role. Later, Friedrich's work became more of a companion, from which elements like the stroll, the perception of landscape as a transitional space, and the difference between it and humans repeatedly appear in my projects. The concept of landscape itself as a cultural construct, however, became essential for our project work in urban, peripheral, or vernacular spaces. For me, it defines a space of complex cultural, political, and social interactions that we have been investigating, describing, and placing at the center of attention for the MAP project platform for 20 years.

HC: In your opinion, why is Friedrich's work still relevant today?

MA: Today, for me, Friedrich marks a crucial interface when it comes to our relationship with what we call "nature," even though we are usually talking about culture. In Romantic painting, especially in his work, the landscape appears as an interim space between these two concepts, articulating the unbridgeable distance between humans and nature, and portraying the loss of unity sometimes soberly, sometimes melancholically. In the key painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Friedrich uses the Rückenfigur (figure seen from behind) to obscure the center of the painting to such an extent that the viewer is denied a view of what is separated from him, and can only reflect – and repeat – himself. Even in his time, the painting captured a deep decontextualization of humankind, who from then on looked much more at something rather than being in it when speaking about their relationship to the world. When we talk about "Um-welt" (the environment, i.e., what surrounds us) today instead of "the world we live in," this constitutes a state of disjunction that can be identified as a fundamental problem of the Anthropocene. The distancing, which in Friedrich's time was still accompanied by skepticism and pain, has long allowed us to view the world as something other. This distance, which culminates in today's climate crisis, will, in the worst-case scenario, be our undoing. Friedrich and his contemporaries thus play a decisive role at the beginning of the Anthropocene, which already then implicitly posed the question of whether we want to live with and in the world – or whether we can survive against it at all.