Oliver Boberg’s photographs are meticulously crafted illusions. Trained as a realist painter but frustrated by the ornamentality his paintings seemed to manifest, Boberg turned to photography, seeking to create unerring representations of the world without relinquishing the satisfaction of craftsmanship. To do this, Boberg roams cities and towns taking snapshots of ordinary places – buildings, highways, parking lots. He distills and compiles details from his photographs that guide him in the production of a three-dimensional model of an archtypical structure or place. Influenced by film and the small-scale trickery of stage sets, Boberg works like a set designer, creating his structures from photographs but also from memory. Highly attuned to the fact that the end product will be a single image, Boberg constructs his miniature stages in such a way that they can be understood from only one point of view – that of his camera. In Garteneingang (2001), Boberg explores the landscape of the soulless modern metropolis. Boberg’s photographs challenge our conceptions about the nature of reality, memory, and recognition, and assumptions about landscape and photography. As the New York Times wrote, “each muted,
severely formal picture is an elegant exercise in Modernist wasteland chic.”


Born and raised in Herten, Germany, Boberg now lives in Fürth, Germany. His works have been exhibited at The Power Plant, Toronto; the Musée de l’Elysée, Switzerland; L.A. Galerie, Frankfurt; Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art; Yerba Guena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Koldo Mixtelena Kulturunea, San Sebastian, Spain; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim, New York; Museum of Modern Art, NewYork; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and LAC in Geneva, Switzerland.