With a feeling of empathy for the simple beauties of the landscape on the edges of our cities, the artist Simone Nieweg (*1962) creates her engaging photographs. In the surroundings of her home in the Rhineland, but also in other regions of Germany and France, she finds her motifs, which radiate a sensitive aesthetic quality without pathos or exaggerated effects. They are pictures that have their precursors in early Dutch painting or by Van Gogh, for example, and whose colorfulness conveys the experience of changing weather and light conditions. At times, one senses the smell of damp earth and the scent of fresh greenery.
For more than 30 years, the artist has devoted herself to rural areas with her large-format camera, capturing what gives the countryside structure and continuity: alternative allotments, future building land, stretches of meadow, fields turning into wild growth, vegetable beds, plowed fields, or blossoming fruit trees. Typical and at the same time whimsical are also the sheds and small constructions for compost heaps built using the most economical means, which Simone Nieweg portrays unspectacularly but lovingly, like relics from another time. The influence of man can be seen everywhere.
In today's world, in which the existential foundations of humanity are increasingly under discussion, her images gain all the more topicality.