Peter Von Felbert

The list of magazines for which Peter von Felbert (*1966) has already worked is impressive. After studying visual communication in Bielefeld, this photographer established himself on the market. Together with Anne Eickenberg, he operated a photo archive, which allowed a glimpse of their work online: atmospheric images of the night life of Munich and Zurich, as well as refreshing portraits or a series focused on people at the Diana Memorial. Most notable is how color always appears to have the last word in all the diverse themes photographed. It predominantly gives the images a mood that almost says: this is the deciding twist. Mostly painterly and with a sealed complexion of antiquated flair, Peter von Felbert’s photographs presented at LUMAS are images of amusement. We see photographs of pleasure boats and simultaneously the accord of red, white and blue, a woman in a meadow, green, white and blue or the colorful dabs of a carousel in some landscape brochure. These photographs remind us of the early stages of color photography, minuscules colored with orange, green and violet and potato starch particles utilized as light filters, whose effect accommodated the prevailing taste of pointillism in the 1900s. But Peter von Felbert’s works play with the stylistic device of the Fin de Siècle: through the cutting of objects, which impressionism borrowed from photography, or the purist perception of peaceful, gliding boats, which reminds us of the pinnacle of pitctorialism.
You can feel the photographer’s happiness in his experiments. You can see the conflict between the history of photography and the audacity of eclecticism. With sensitivity, Felbert quotes a great epoch of the medium of photography.

Dr. Boris von Brauchitsch

1990 DDR Bilder, Ravensberger Spinnerei, Bielefeld