Fredrik Marsh - Dresden Project

In an extended series of photographs created during a three-month artist residency in 2002 and over four subsequent summers in Dresden, Germany, Fredrik Marsh documented the detritus of human culture found in the decaying interior spaces of vacant factories and abandoned apartment complexes. Revealing the juxtapositions and ironies still abundant in the post-Socialist world, Marsh reveals the old and the new as well as the grandeur and the decay of once-majestic buildings and former residences in a city steeped in history.

Nearly two decades since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, life in the former German Democratic Republic is largely unfamiliar to the West and the American experience. Concerned with transitions of the physical as well as the psychological, his Dresden Project provides a visual record of this historic period before its traces–and cultural memory–disappear.

Focusing on Dresden’s rise from the destruction of WWII, emergence from the Kremlin-influenced German Democratic Republic period, and recent transition to its prominent role once again as a significant cultural and architecturally important city in the reunified German state, a series of exhibitions, lectures, and a planned accompanying publication will foster engagement and dialogue here and abroad. 

With support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, Technische Sammlungen Museen der Stadt Dresden and in cooperation with the City of Dresden Amt für Kultur und Denkmalschutz, exhibitions will be available for American and European venues through 2012. 

Exhibitions include the following:

Cataloguing Attitudes: Contemporary Photography and the Archive. Group exhibition. Co-curated by Beatrix Reinhardt and Siona Wilson, Art Gallery of the College of Staten Island, Staten Island, New York. April 1, 2009 – May 14, 2009.

Transitions: The Dresden Project / Photographs by Fredrik Marsh. One-person exhibition. Weston Art Gallery, Aronoff Center for the Arts, Cincinnati, Ohio. April 10, 2009 – June 7, 2009.

Follow this link to view installation photographs of the exhibition at Weston Art Gallery, Aronoff Center for the Arts, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Upcoming exhibitions include the following:

Übergänge: Das Dresden Projekt / Fotografien von Fredrik Marsh. One-person exhibition. Technische Sammlungen Museen der Stadt Dresden, Dresden, Germany. September 18, 2009 – January 24, 2010. 

An accompanying publication with text in both English and German, will be released in late September by Technische Sammlungen Dresden / Sandstein Verlag, Dresden. Follow this link to view an image.

Fredrik Marsh was educated at The Ohio State University, earning a BFA degree in 1980 and MFA degree in 1984. He has exhibited his work since 1978, most recently in New York, Texas, Germany, China, and Syria. His photographs are in the collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts–Houston, Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden, and the Toledo Museum of Art, among others. Since 1985, Marsh has received six Individual Artist Fellowships from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts/Arts Midwest, and the Ohio Arts Council, and was awarded Artist Project Grants from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Ohio Arts Council, and Saxonian Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst. He lives and works in Columbus, Ohio.

For more information please contact the artist directly by visiting his website.