Wilhelm Schürmann

Wilhelm Schürmann, *1946, lives and works in Herzogenrath and Berlin
The artist, collector and curator of contemporary art Wilhelm Schürmann is one of the great Pioneers of photographic art in Germany. With subtle humour and objectivity he has captured the scars, breaks and contradictions of post-war German urban landscapes - not only, but especially in the coal pot

• in his pictures. His black and white photographs show residential buildings in the border area of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. They are, in the true sense of the word, character buildings: Because Wilhelm Schürmann’s photography of a house always tells a story about the human being in it. And that without showing the people: a sloping windowsill, an unorthodox front yard, peculiar house gables testify to its presence. Wilhelm Schürmann calls these scurrilities by human hand “self-knitted architecture”. Often it’s just details that make individual buildings from standard constructions, giving them a physiognomy of their own, so that - as Schürmann puts it “things get a face”.