On February 7th, Ursula and I chugged to Frankfurt in a friend's VW bus. In the hold 31 pictures from our fine art project THE POWER OF THE ELEMENTS. About the planning phase and also about the delivery of the pictures we have already reported in the blog. In the meantime, the office space has been fully furnished and I had the great honor of actually taking pictures of the pictures...

When you enter the Omniturm area, you are initially overwhelmed by how coherent the concept by architect Sabina Blaeser and interior designer Nazanin Malek appears. It's kind of a mix between work and home. Cozy lounges alternate with offices.

What is also fascinating is how sensitively Nazanin Malek selected the images. Everything seems harmonious. For me there are five topics that I would particularly like to highlight:

Picture in the team area

Everyone agreed: This picture was made for this place. It captures the colors of the room so perfectly that you would think the picture was planned based on the room. Or vice versa. But the fact is that the photo was taken on an icy winter day in Iceland in 2020 when I was walking from the famous plane wreck back to the parking lot. I took photos of the monolith in the howling wind with the lighting ranging from warm orange to cool blue.

Picture in one of the lounges

For this blue painted wall, Nazanin chose one of my favorite motifs. The spray from Dettifoss covers the basalt wall. The whole thing looks more like an abstract painting than a photograph. Interesting detail on the side: To my left were dozens of tourists taking photos of the waterfall. But no one seemed to notice the almost mystical stone wall with the spray...

The “rust picture”

During our trip to Iceland in 2014, some so-called “photooriginals” were created - images that only exist once. We achieved this by taking ten 125 x 125 cm steel plates with us to Iceland and letting them corrode on site by exposing them to salt water, wind and weather. We then mounted pictures from Iceland onto these steel plates - a few centimeters apart so that it looks as if the photos are floating on the steel plate. One of these photo originals now adorns a seating area in the Omnitower.

Diptychs

In contrast to the offices and lounges, where the pictures are presented in black oak frames with shadow gaps, all pictures in the corridors are in black and white and framed in light oak frames. This creates a new level of presentation, which I think is very exciting. I chose two photos from the abundance of motifs in the corridors: One shows a silver ribbon of river flowing into the sea on black lava sand. This photo was taken on Iceland's south coast, near Jökulsarlon. The second picture was taken on the Pacific northeast coast. It shows a group of humpback whales bubblenet feeding.

Employee offices

Each employee was allowed to choose a picture for his/her workplace. These pictures were then not hung, but placed on the sideboards. I've never seen that before, but I think it seems very consistent: