About.

I was born and grew up in a small town in the Sauerland in Germany. To study free art, I was drawn to the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. There I first studied sculpture and painting with Professor Karl Bobek. I took my professor's statement, that my photographic and film documentation of my work was better than my work itself, to heart and switched to Professor Nam June Paik 's class.

During this time, numerous videos, photographs and performances were made, including in seminars given by the lecturer Christoph Schlingensief. I became a master student with Nam June Paik and was responsible for the editing of some of his videos and set up various exhibitions of his, including documenta 8. As a tutor for the class, I made several trips to Nam June Paik in New York.

After graduating, I worked as a freelance cameraman and producer for the WDR, among others, for which I produced the artist portrait of Ulrich Rückriem in my own production. In the years that followed, I was employed as a director and cameraman in various film production companies, first in Düsseldorf and then in Hamburg, and was a guest lecturer in media design at the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen.

Eventually I started my own commercial production business based in Hamburg and with a branch in Hong Kong. I ended my time in Hamburg and founded the film and event production company connection park in Düsseldorf, of which I am the sole shareholder.

In 2016, together with Peter Witt, I brought the festival die digitale to life, which deals with digital art, music and contemporary criticism. I am co-partner and curator of the annual festival in Düsseldorf.

In all these years I have always been privately involved with photography and in 2000 I resumed my artistic work with the medium of photography. Since then I have participated in several group exhibitions .

Statements.

"Just one picture?"

Artist Statement

"People need a term for everything. So you can best describe my art with the term ICM photography (intentional camera movement), the intended camera movement. My art stems from my preoccupation with filmic processes, which, along with photography, have accompanied me my entire life. A cinematic scene shows a sequence of several images, e.g. B. 25 per second. A photo shows a picture. A photo in motion shows several images in one. This creates a different, a new reality for the photographed subject. Of course, as an artist, I choose the motif, but what the camera makes of it in motion is only within my control to a very limited extent. Sometimes I wonder if this is how I become the curator of my camera. From many photos I select a few, which I place in a thematic context. My pictures are not edited or cropped, the format is determined by the camera, I choose the section. This is how I form a unit with my camera. Researching and recognizing new or different realities with the eye of the lens is my job, my art. The result is often reminiscent of painting or modern architecture, of metamorphic processes or of photographed energy. Energy that lets us immerse ourselves in our own experiences of being. So everyone sees something different in my pictures. Similar to abstract painting. Building blocks become a Feininger picture, an industrial landscape a London cityscape, a decorative object a cocoon, a backrest an energy field."

Ulrich Westerfroelke, 2019

"... Time, speed, movement, but also the fleeting, the incomprehensible, the vague or even insecurity can find expression in a picture. The art, in this particular case Werner Pillig's photographs, offer an unprotected insight into the artist's innermost being. It is a rare opportunity to empathize with the individual attitude towards life of another person and to bring it into resonance with one's own. ..."

"Werner Pillig - photographer, filmmaker, painter, sculptor,

narrator of the moment"

Heinrich Guthoff, 2019

""The narration of the moment" means the narration of the optical moment, the vision of an optical appearance, the transformation of reality into a story, a narration of the image itself. Appearances in black and white, in colour, surreal, above everyday reality and in the reality of the picture. Motifs such as spun fields are reminiscent of films based on Jules Verne's novels. Associations with concrete landscapes and unreal dream landscapes combine with an inner view of one's own existence. Werner Pillig investigates the phenomenon of concrete structures. Structures arise from the interweaving of individual elements and layers, micro versus macro, large becomes small, small becomes large. A concept develops in which light, movement, the real and the incomprehensible are combined in a complex way. Individual real pictorial objects face each other like ciphers, as an enigma, architectural, tectonic, sculptural, painterly, abstract signs that evoke a concrete experience of an enigmatic reality.
...
Distorting, blurring, moving, alienating during the exposure, the lens of the camera and the photographer's eye intertwine, are essential components of the creative moment. The result is a merging of spontaneous pictorial moments into a pictorial idea, comparable to Gerhard Richter's color paintings. Flash, movement, sharpness, blur, micro, macro are components that enable one's own mental landscapes, from concrete associations to the discovery of new visual phenomena. Werner Pillig uses a color palette that produces classic color contrasts and at the same time finds finely tuned color values, as can be found in Dutch Baroque painting. Multiple exposures, layers of reflections vibrate the moment captured in his still lifes. The phenomenon of frozen movement, the idea of quasi-electric light as an energetic impulse, the opening up of photographers to other art genres, these are elements that Werner Pillig recognized for himself as a filmmaker and photographer in parallel with sculpture early in the 1980s and developed. In the early photographic works of the Academy period, the transition from micro and macro, from the small model to the monumental effect, is already clear in the example of the photo staging of the cross figure. Depictions of blurriness and the apparently vague are stylistic elements that enable the viewer to use the photographs to analogously connect to their own visual and dream experiences and image memories. So to one of your own, in
In a way, a surreal existential experience, concrete and perhaps not really quite tangible, as an intuition of what has already been experienced, but not as a sentimental review, but as a feeling of an intangible basic experience of moments that are reminiscent of pre-conceptual experiences, of a "moment of being", in whose own personality was still incomprehensible."

Prof. Dr. Luca Viglialoro, 2022, Professor of Aesthetics, Art and Cultural Theory at the HBK Essen
On the occasion of the vernissage of the solo exhibition "Transformations"

"Transformation and life are two moments of sensuality that merge into one another: change, defiguration, shaping of the aisthesis (at the same time perception and perceived) are the stages of a life process that fathoms itself in an already-not-yet. Transformation is therefore not the manifestation of the recognizable , but the fundamental, indissoluble persistence of instability. This instability, which strives for its way of life, is evidenced, among other things, by friend Werner’s “Metamorphosis”: The perceptible and the perceptive are, as it were, caught in a mutual unknowability, both probably in search of one Aesthetics, a meaning, the form and at the same time after its other.Werner's art transforms this search for meaning into an image that the viewer has to engage with with the aim of redesigning her sensual existence (in Rilke's words): "You have to change your life."

Prof. Mischa Kuball, 2022, conceptual artist and professor for public art, Academy of Media Arts Cologne
On the occasion of the vernissage of the solo exhibition "Transformations"

"The Metamorphoses (Latin Metamorphoses "transformations" or Metamorphoseon libri "Books of Metamorphoses") by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, probably written around the year 1 AD to 8 AD, is a mythological poem written in hexameters about Metamorphoses (ancient Greek metamorphósis "transformation into a different form") In 15 books, each with around 700 to 900 verses, the history of the world is told from its beginnings to the present of the poet and in around 250 individual sagas from Roman and Greek mythology portrayed with great artistic esprit.From their appearance, the Metamorphoses have been one of the most popular mythical poems of all and certainly the one best known to medieval writers and poets.The influence of this work on the literature of subsequent times as well as on the visual arts of the Middle Ages, the Baroque through to modern times is enormous.

So Werner Pillig takes a further step in the form of his metamorphoses, they take the material world as a base camp, if you will - for subjective selection - these are then almost swirled into other aggregate states and catapulted into new spheres of meaning...

But can you trust your own eyes?

Once in Sandro Botticelli's primavera 1482 - as an allegory of spring or the month of May, a reflex of contemporary festival culture, embodiment of Neoplatonic love theory, bridal room decoration, symbol of marriage, allegory of the flourishing of the Florentine Republic under the Medici and the re-blossoming of painting in competition with poetry and Music, a medium of inspiration for fertility and beauty – these are just a few of the interpretations of the picture that have been proposed so far, in which the aesthetic demands and ideals of a time are concentrated, in which the Florentine banker Lorenzo de' Medici is generally regarded as the leading political and cultural figure. A key strength of this painting by Sandro Botticelli (1444/45 – 1510) lies precisely in the calculated poetic iridescence of the spectrum of meaning, which should by no means be confused with vagueness.

The fact that this "shimmering" was achieved with the use of figures from pagan mythology, who were offered a prominent and large-format stage in the picture, must have seemed scandalous under the political influence of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, which was soon to take effect. And accordingly, the conditions of the art market changed so significantly shortly after the painting was created that with La Primavera what we call the early Renaissance reached both a climax and an end point.

But what did Werner Pillig take from the great master of the global groove Nam June Paik into his methodically tested practice? Yes, also the critical humor that accompanies his comments and de_formations and accounts for the current status of both artistic positions...

But maybe it is possible and like Roland Barthes once - when he introduced the term "punctum" into the photography debate - Roland Barthes uses the term "punctum" as a linguistic means to examine the meaning of photography. The term refers to a particular detail in a photograph that captivates or "wounds" the viewer, completing it as an object of reflection.

With this in mind – please embark on a search on your own responsibility!"