Horst Ademeit

The story of Horst Ademeit is widely known. Born in 1937 in Cologne, he started as a textile designer, then, at the turn of 60s and 70s, he studied for a while at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf under Joseph Beuys. Not recognized and dismissed, Ademeit turned to photography in the 70s, using it as a means to document reality as precisely as possible, led by the paranoia of being exposed on destructive cold rays radiation. The opus vitae of Ademeit is, without a doubt, a series of polaroids. Each of 6006 (sic!) photographs is numbered, dated and described, including the information on smells, weather and other circumstances. Later, Ademeit worked also in digital photography. On the one hand, the body of his work may be seen as a study of madness. Going further, also as a general obsession of archives, appropriating every aspect of life and knowledge. Together with self-constructed measurement devices, Ademeit’s works can be integrated into conceptual art, echoing the same issues, such as language, time and perception. The artist was discovered shortly before his death in 2010, with his first exhibitions in Cologne, at the Galerie Susanne Zander and Sabine Schmidt Galerie. Shortly after, the White Columns Gallery from New York (2010) produced a documentary on Ademeit. Posthumously, “Secret Universe” (2011), his first museum exhibition, was curated by Lynne Cooke and held at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The photographer was also included at the Sao Paulo Biennale (2012).