Es löscht das Meer die Sonne aus

(The Sea Extinguishes the Sun)

What the eye misses when it moves too fast, and what gets lost along the way, becomes the material of Moritz Berg’s work. At a time when visual culture accelerates and overwhelms, his practice slows perception and shifts attention from the spectacular to the subtle.

Born in 1994 in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Moritz Berg lives and works in Stuttgart. Trained in architecture, he has developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture and photography. His work has been shown internationally, including in Berlin, New York, Lisbon and Vienna.

show Ondes Sans Rivage brought together works produced outdoors, exposed to rain, moving shadows and environmental traces. The new exhibition continues Berg’s attempt to hold on to the subtle, expanding this approach through the inclusion of photographic elements. This connects to his photobook published last year, where he collected everyday moments and careful observations and assembled them into a loose visual narrative. Shown together here for the first time, the works develop a visual language that moves between abstraction and figuration. 



The exhibition’s title refers to a sunset, when the sun disappears into the sea. Yet the title subtly reverses their roles, giving the landscape an active presence and shifting attention toward what usually remains in the background. This atmosphere continues in the photographic works, produced along coastlines during Berg’s travels. Arranged in grid-like structures, the images move between document and trace, recording ordinary situations. Through the process of making, their surfaces are altered, giving renewed attention to the moments they depict.

Alongside the photographic works, each series is accompanied by an abstract wooden wall relief, offering a second translation of the same initial moment. These works begin from subtle gestures that translate movement into line and form. The resulting lines are close to drawing in space, recording movement and chance rather than any controlled gesture.

A further group of large-scale works on canvas brings together these two registers. They translate the photographic fragments and the abstract line-based reliefs into a shared pictorial space, where figure and abstraction begin to overlap. In these works, traces of both processes are condensed into a more open visual field, in which image and structure remain in constant tension. Together, these bodies of work explore slowness, trace and transformation. They move between image and residue, control and exposure, asking what becomes visible when perception is no longer rushed.

The exhibition takes place at Artem, an industrial space in Forest equipped with large-format printing and cutting machines, exceptionally open to the public for the occasion. 
Es löscht das Meer die Sonne aus, the sea extinguishes the sun. A moment that vanishes as we see it. Perhaps that is what Berg is after: to shift perception, so that seeing becomes a decision.