about

I was born and grew up in a small town in the Sauerland. I went to the art academy in Düsseldorf to study fine art. There I initially 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 created, including in seminars given by lecturer Christoph Schlingensief. I became a master student with Nam June Paik and was responsible for editing 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 New York to see Nam June Paik.

After graduating, I worked as a freelance cameraman and producer for, among others, WDR, for which I made the artist portrait of Ulrich Rückriem as an in-house production. In the following years I was employed as a director and cameraman in various film production houses, first in Düsseldorf and then in Hamburg, and was a guest lecturer for media design at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences.

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

Artist Statement - "Just a photo?"

My art comes from dealing with filmic processes, which, alongside photography, have accompanied me my entire life. 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, metamorphic processes or photographed energy. Energy that allows us to immerse ourselves in our own experiences of being. My pictures are not digitally edited, they are taken as the viewer sees them.

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”:

…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…

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”:

…The perceptible and the perceivers are caught in a mutual unknowability, both probably searching for an aesthetic, a meaning, a form and at the same time for their other. Werner's art transforms this search for meaning into an image…

Heinrich Guthoff, 2019, visual artist

...Representations of blurriness and seemingly unspecific things are style-forming elements that allow the viewer to use the photographs to connect analogously to their own visual and dream experiences and visual memories. In other words, to their own, in a certain sense surreal, existential experience, concrete and perhaps not really quite tangible, as an inkling of what has already been experienced, but not as a sentimental retrospective, but as a feeling of an intangible basic experience of moments that are reminiscent of pre-conceptual experiences, of a "moment of being" in which their own personality was still incomprehensible.

Nathalie Schulz, 2024, art historian

...Werner Pillig also draws our attention to the transience and our inability to capture things and places as they are. No object, no person, no place that we encounter is permanently tangible for us. No memory can be frozen forever. What is there in one moment can pass in the next. Pillig's photographs thus remain more like the fleeting idea of a place or a memory that cannot be captured and yet develop their poetic power and beauty precisely because of this.

Ulrich Westerfrölke, 2019, visual artist

... 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 experience another person's individual attitude to life and to bring it into resonance with one's own...