Mårten Lange’s The Palace, KARL, 2024, is a brilliant continuation of his last self-published photobook, Threshold (KARL, 2023). The two books share a systematic approach to addressing iterations of architecture that morph and suggest, among other things, portals to history and the domestic interior as ephemeral markers, respectively. The shift from his previous books, Ghost Witness (Loose Joints, 2020) and The Mechanism (MACK, 2015), was evident beginning with Threshold.

The former books detailed the urban contemporary environment, presenting questions of uncertainty. Ghost Witness addressed the facade of ideological and economic presentation in modern China. Though this was not stated directly, one can correlate China’s former booming architectural rise with the reality of most of its population, particularly those outside of the ghostly high rises and Potemkin village facades. As Evergreen’s collapse dawned, Lange’s book seemed to hint at changes in China’s architectural and economic development. The Mechanism more or less addressed similar issues but considered how we read the urban environment from the ground up. There were gestures to that work that made my viewing of the book suggestive of being trapped in a watch’s gears with slight shifts of perspective, trapped under glass.

There is no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one. With relief, humiliation, and terror, he understood that he, too, was a mere appearance dreamt by another. Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now.-Jorge Luis Borges, The Labyrinth, 1962

With The Palace, there is a shift from focusing on the present to making considerations of Europe and the Near East’s architectural traditions, but, like Threshold, there is an esoteric presentation of doorways. Here, stairs and the palimpsests of where architectural histories exchange in swatches of material changes of portico, columns, and passageways map the concept. It suggests less an architectural strategy than it does an abstruse consideration of history viewed through its fragments. In some ways, and perhaps a stretch, The Palace is akin to a memory palace, where culture and the long line of history parallel the last 2-3,000 years of human developments are archived and reconstituted into something like enigmatic cultural memory. This tendency suggests a familiarity with the built environment, a muscle memory of palaces burned and castles ransacked and destroyed over millennia. The surfaces read like braille when touched, consumed, and disseminated under the observant eye.

What I keep coming back to with Lange’s work is that there is a profound sense of consistency spread over his books. Though his earlier books are varied, there is a constancy in his equilibrium of observing the natural world and its built counterparts. Each book offers a slight but stable series of images that add a layer to what came before. He does not run out of ideas for the iterations of his considerations.

This suggests an admirable uniformity. He continues the trajectory of a solid artist with The Palace, still in his youth. This cannot be undervalued. Where The Palace differs is the suggestion of mediating ancient Europe with how we view its precedents from a point removed in the future. The fragments of architecture run together, asking broader questions about culture and the mapping of ancient terrain. To say it is about history alone would be disingenuous as it asks as many questions about that as it does how we navigate societies in our present and uncertain times.

In terms of similar attitudes toward photography and the book form, I would draw a parallel to the work of Pino Musi, particularly his books Grecia, Le Radici della Civiltà Europea (2019) and Italia Belleza Eterna (2011), amongst others. Of historical note, I would also suggest that Roloff Beny’s widely-circulated Wiege Unserer Welt (1958) is also good company. One might also suggest Herbert List’s Licht über Hellas: Eine Symphonie in Bildern (1953) as a shared compendium of ruins and fragments.

What I might suggest that differs in both Beny and List is that Lange denies the romanticism, like Musi, often involved in such undertakings. This more cerebral decision removes the category of past-gazing as triumphal or saccharine. Musi and Lange interpret architecture and history but do not follow the false premise that history is overly definable outside of the moment experienced from a first-person and contemporary perspective. It is essential to understand that Musi and Lange are analytical first. Still, the aggregate summation of their pictures is a discussion that is more philosophical than relying on perceived absolutes. This is in considerable measure due to both artists having very contemporary post-existential, post-deconstructive ways of parsing out the topics with grace.

Robert Morat Gallery

Lange only gets stronger with each book. The miraculous consistency of his vision is something one should aspire to; each brick or slab of stone, a building block to rectify the perils of understanding the built environment and its histories without only one declared notion of history. Pick this up; it will challenge you to think through what is assumed in our deciphering of the core of the human interface with culture, history, and the built environment of our predecessors. The work is available at the Robert Morat Gallery in Berlin. In full transparency, we will be running a workshop with Lange on these topics in the Spring of 2025 in Athens, a perfect city to rectify the issues and to consult its material value.

Mårten Lange

The Palace

KARL

Mårten Lange and Brad Feuerhelm

Material and Time – Past, Present, and Future

Athens, Greece

March 25-29th, 2025

Robert Morat Gallery

Mårten Lange | The Palace

January-March, 2025