Simone Nieweg's landscapes show the type of countryside you often see only fleetingly from a car window - at first glance unspectacular, but on closer inspection revealing a subtle beauty. With precursors in early Dutch painting or van Gogh, photographer Simone Nieweg shows a keen eye for the simple beauties of the landscape on the edges of cities, capturing garden lots, meadows, sheds, fields turning into wild growth, vegetable beds, plowed fields, or blossoming fruit trees.

For Simone Nieweg the view of nature and the areas made usable by man was already the starting point of her artistic work in the 1980s. As a student of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf she has been informed by Bernd and Hilla Becher by documenting sturcures and physical evidence of human industrie, also in subtle and unassuming ways. Even then, pressing questions about how to deal with our natural resources were in the background. With her color photographs, which she takes in the Rhineland, in several regions of Germany and in France with the large-format camera, she draws attention to the often overlooked peripheral areas of our towns and industrial areas and shows what aesthetics emerge when these still unplanned places are used in a limited way, usually on one's own initiative, for gardening or agriculture. The artist captures what gives structure and continuity to the land: alternative allotments, grazing land, pieces of meadow, fields turning into wild growth, vegetable beds, plowed fields in winter or blossoming fruit trees as harbingers of spring. Buildings erected with simple means, be they sheds or compost racks, can also be discovered as typical elements of her landscapes.

Published on the occasion of the 2023/2024 exhibition at SK Stiftung Kultur Köln.