UNTER TAGE

2008- 20020 FINE ART PRINTS FRAMED BEHIND GLAS, DIFFERENT SIZES, EDITION OF 3

In recent years, Winkhaus has transformed this subterranean world into her new series, Unter-Tage. The fourteen large-scale images open a gateway into a labyrinthine underworld, inhabited by bizarre figures seemingly belonging to a parallel society. Like a sudden sweep of a flashlight, Winkhaus reveals scenes of raw intensity—a young boy whose piercing gaze challenges the viewer, while lifeless bodies slump behind him; a false Goethe, suffocated by his own ostentatious grandeur; a warrior woman with bruised knees, encircled by a disaffected tribe clad in tattered denim.

Aesthetically, Winkhaus' visual language recalls the Old Masters of the Renaissance and Baroque, not only in the dramatic staging of bodies and expressions but also in her orchestration of vision: the composition compels the eye to wander from detail to detail, to peer into the shadows, to seek the hidden. The three-dimensionality evokes a frozen film still, while texture and color retain an unmistakably painterly quality.

Technically, this series pushes beyond the confines of photography. Figures, props, and backdrops were shot separately and assembled within an alternative, non-linear perspective system. Winkhaus drives her art to the very limits of the medium, propelled by an innate restlessness and a refusal to settle for what she has already mastered. She expands the photographic gaze, infusing it with emotional depth, implicating the viewer within the scene rather than allowing them to remain a passive observer.

‚Unter Tage‘ is not merely an antithesis to the surface—it is a reflection of its hidden internal structure. Winkhaus is concerned with the relentless unmasking of society, offering her protagonists a moment of self-reflection—an impetus for emancipation. Beauty and abyss are closely intertwined: immaculate silk shirts gleam alongside rusted industrial machinery or a human skull, central to a frenzied ritual. Light falls with equal precision on filth and opulence, on violence, corruption, and dark desires.

Unter-Tage confronts, in a provocative yet strangely hopeful manner, how unsettling life can be—and perhaps, how it need not be.