Due to the corona, the municipality of Gauting awarded the Günther-Klinge-Kulturpreis, endowed with a total of 3000 euros, this year before the beginning of a municipal council meeting.
The ceremony is not planned until next year.
The Starnberger Merkur presents the three winners in a loose row.
Today: Photo artist Michael Nguyen.
Gauting
- The Mühlradl on Lederersteg, the tower of the rice mill under a blood-red sky: "Nature is in us" is the title of a series of photo paintings that are exhibited in Gauting's town hall.
The permanent loans in the hallway in front of the residents' registration office come from Michael Nguyen.
The photo artist has only lived in Gauting for six years.
He was all the more astonished and downright “flabbergasted” that the community honored him with the Klinge Culture Prize.
“I'm a newcomer here,” says the 63-year-old, who used to live in Berlin.
Michael Nguyen opens up “completely new perspectives on their old and new home” to the citizens, explains Mayor Dr.
Brigitte Kössinger on the artist's work.
Nguyen comes from Bad Wimpfen in Baden-Württemberg. He is a nurse by profession. But as early as the late 1980s he began “taking photos in the cultural field in Berlin,” as he says. “Art opens our eyes”, the 63-year-old is convinced. And the works that can be seen in the town hall also fit in with this.
For example, the well-known illustrator and former chairman of the Gautinger Kunstverein, Bernd Wiedemann, wrote this text about the alienated photo of the blossoming chestnut tree with a view of the Buchendorfer Feld: “Michael Nguyen's photography is the art of showing more than you can see ... “The photo artist goes“ with the third eye of a hiker through the visual adventure of life ”. The photo artist has already published the much-acclaimed photo series “Heimat Gauting: Am Strasserand” on his own website.
“I once looked after the website of the art association,” reports Nguyen, who is also editor-in-chief of the online magazine for photography and art “Tagree”. But he has to be careful with his energy. Nguyen is chronically ill and has to wash his blood once a week. "After that, I'm always beaten," he says. And that's why he only works for things "that are important to me". Nevertheless, even during lockdown, the creative head was regularly out and about with his camera looking for motifs in Gauting.
Brigitte Kössinger praised the 63-year-old at the award ceremony with his documentation of the Gautinger summer pool, which was known to be the Olympic training facility in 1972 and which was known to have been an Olympic training facility. He had just completed projects about the Munich Allianz Arena, which was closed in lockdown and deserted, but also about the Gautinger Asklepios Clinic - with texts from the Gautinger community archivist Regine Hilpert-Greger. In the photos of empty buildings, in which there was still a secret air force hospital during the Second World War, which the Americans converted into a hospital for forced laborers from German concentration camps suffering from tuberculosis, “I focused on the reflection of the trees in the windows,” explains Nguyen his work.
In addition to the Klinge Culture Prize, he has also received other well-known awards.
In 2020 he was awarded gold at the Budapest International Photo Awards, and he has just received the “Muse Photography Award” 2021 for his unusual perspectives.
Christine Cless-Wesle
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