NACHTS

Venice: city of surfaces, of colors, of all-encompassing light. Nikolaus Korab plunges it into the deep black of his night images. The photographs remove the city from the intoxicating staccato of image production and direct our eyes to an unknown, remote, dark Venice. Korab’s work with his analog large-format camera captures the anonymous architectures of the city’s “poor” and in no way picturesque quarters, imbuing them with a hitherto undreamed-of dignity removed from time. Korab’s photographs are also reflections on the medium of photography. The representational disappears, the narrative is eliminated, contrasts are sharpened. What remains are pure black and an economy of light. Korab, the meticulous flâneur, creates monumental set designs.

Nikolaus Korab is a freelance artist living and working in Vienna and Lower Austria. Since the early 1990s Korab has been working in large-format photography (4×5 inch at first and also 8×10 inch since 2006) and exploring the medium of the printed book as a subject of photography. Numerous solo and group exhibitions in Austria and abroad. His works are part of many public and private collections. He became a member of Künstlerhaus Wien in 2020.