My Framed New World

Florian Albrecht-Schoeck’s work begins with an artistic decision: Florian Albrecht-Schoeck has stopped taking new photographs. Not because he is turning away from photography. His practice continues to draw on an extensive photographic archive he has built up over many years. Yet nothing new is added to this collection for the time being — at least not in the conventional sense of photography, in which someone points a camera at something and presses the shutter.

This decision has a political dimension. Faced with a present marked by violence and social developments that he no longer wishes simply to document photographically, the act of no longer taking photographs becomes an artistic gesture in its own right. But the end of photographing does not mean the end of photographic images. The act of capture comes to a halt, while the existing material continues to evolve.

Working with his existing photographs, Albrecht-Schoeck develops his own systems and engages deeply with machine-learning processes. His work is based on open-source models that he further develops in response to his artistic questions and trains using his own material. For him, artificial intelligence is a tool whose underlying conditions he understands and deliberately shapes. Image generation is not left to a black box. At the same time, photography repeatedly reasserts itself: generated images are transferred onto photographic media or themselves become the subject of a new photographic image.

Albrecht-Schoeck’s work is self-reflexive on several levels. It interrogates the medium of photography, its technical conditions and its relationship to reality — while repeatedly turning the same scrutiny on the artist himself. Albrecht-Schoeck becomes a figure within his own images, multiplying and transforming himself. He appears as a man or a woman, as a child, an adult or an elderly person, inhabiting different identities and historical roles. His own image thus becomes material for an exploration of individuality, identity and the question of what an image can still claim to attest to.

At the same time, Albrecht-Schoeck (HfG Offenbach) moves between a wide range of visual languages. He quotes and layers styles, historical imagery and aesthetic codes, developing a distinctly individual visual language of his own. Much initially seems familiar, yet the longer one looks, the stranger it becomes. A particular sense of the uncanny emerges — a kind of uncanny valley that extends beyond individual bodies and faces to encompass entire visual worlds. Humour, exaggeration and absurdity are just as integral to the work as its critical engagement with media and its political dimensions.

Opening Reception
30 October 2026, 7 pm
Introduction by Dr Katrin Weleda

Opening Hours
Thursday & Friday, 4–7 pm
Saturday, 12–3 pm

Raum für Kunst der Darmstädter Sezession
Luisenstraße 16, 64283 Darmstadt