Trees and other soulmates is the title of the new solo exhibition by Loredana Nemes (Sibiu, 1972) scheduled at Podbielski Contemporary in Milan from May 30 to July 19, 2025. Sponsored by Fondazione Sylva, the exhibition brings together two photographic cycles that, although geographically distant, share a common poetic and thematic core: the encounter between nature and human beings, between trees and souls, between what roots and what changes.
At the center of the exhibition is Sicily, an intense, unpublished series developed by Nemes during a period of residence and research on the Mediterranean island. In these photographs, the artist abandons the urban environments to which he had accustomed us, to delve into a natural and human landscape of profound complexity. The protagonists are the Sicilians encountered along the way, portrayed next to their favorite trees: thousand-year-old olive trees, carob trees, prickly pears, pines, almond trees. Nemes’ black and white - rigorous, sober, silent - restores the intimacy of these bonds, the dignity of a coexistence that needs no explanation.
Faces and trunks are mirrored in each other: wrinkles and barks, postures and branches, invisible roots and intertwined lives. It is a suspended time, the one evoked by the series: neither nostalgia nor myth, but a meditative present where man does not dominate nature, he listens to it. Nemes’ Sicily is made of margins, silences, ancient gestures. It is a geography of relationship.
In counterpoint, but in constant dialogue, the exhibition also presents a selection from Graubaum und Himmelmeer (2019-2023), the photographer’s first work entirely dedicated to the natural world. Set in Jasmund National Park in northern Germany, the project juxtaposes images of the centuries-old beech forest with glimpses of the sea horizon. Here, too, Nemes chooses repetition as a method of knowledge: more than a dozen trips to the same place, along the same paths, in front of the same trees. But nothing is ever really the same. The light changes, the clouds flee, the wind interferes with the camera, fatigue creeps into the body. And there is always that beech tree, “the one that makes her throat ache,” as the artist writes, a sign that observation has become almost corporeal.
The effect is one of empathic immersion: in the landscape, in the rhythms, in the long breath of nature. Graubaum und Himmelmeer is neither descriptive nor contemplative. It is an exercise in radical attention. The tree and the sea are subjects that elude, that defy focus, that refuse to be possessed. Just like people.
The juxtaposition of the two series - the Mediterranean and the Baltic - brings out a red thread in Loredana Nemes’ research: the space where visibility dissolves and where natural presence asserts itself as an autonomous and resilient entity. In both collections, the photographer does not “capture” nature: she allows herself to be interrogated by it. It is a relationship, not a framing.
The exhibition project is made possible through a collaboration with Fondazione Sylva, a nonprofit committed to ecological regeneration and cultural production. Established in southern Italy to address the devastating effects of Xylella fastidiosa on olive trees and the biodiversity of the land, the foundation has expanded its reach to include artists, writers and thinkers in a shared reflection on new imaginaries of landscape. Nemes’ exhibition fits fully into this vision: as a form of sensitive regeneration, aesthetic listening and coexistence.
Born in 1972 in Sibiu, Romania, and raised between Eastern Europe and Germany, Loredana Nemes lives and works in Berlin. With a background in mathematics and literature, she approached photography through an almost philosophical approach: formal rigor, narrative empathy, and a constant focus on the dimension of otherness. In her long-term projects - such as Blütezeit, Fearless Women or Portraits of Masculinity - she has investigated bodies and identities, cultural thresholds and representation. With SICILIA and Graubaum und Himmelmeer, the human expands beyond bodies: it becomes a relation to the world, an echo in the landscape.
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| Loredana Nemes on display in Milan: Sicily made of trees, faces and inner landscapes |
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