Hanna Mattes’ (b.1980, Munich, Germany) practice is one of innate multiplicity. Across her photographic works—and more recently, through her performative intervention, paintings and poetic collaborations—Hanna pieces together multiple points of view, as well as moments of action, to create dramatic multiverses.

Select works

Exhibitions and series

Aquatic Antipode

Part of the larger body of work, titled Take Me to That Landscape (a publication project that also encompasses a musical album and texts by various authors), these analogue photographic works picture the horizon; the meeting of swathes of water and sky, bubbling. Looking at these scenes closely, it becomes apparent that these are not records of a singular place. Rather they are composites, seas and skies from elsewheres brought together to manufacture a sense of tranquillity. The artist’s hand and remnants of her assemblage process are visible upon the surfaces of these prints; alluding, perhaps, to the corporeality of the landscape both real and imagined, individual and collective. And in this way, these works speak poetically about a human desire for togetherness; about the gaps and the unseen distances overcome through collaboration.

Take Me to That Landscape

In Take Me to That Landscape spoken word and prose-poetry collide with experimental jazz music and nature sounds. The texts describe fantasies about sexuality, romance, touch, and transcendence. Both Ernst Reijseger and David Rothenberg added their respective musical interpretations.

The Lunar System

“The Lunar System was established as an innocent attempt to mythologize my life. It started when I was a teenager and my friends and I gave each other nicknames that related to the planets and stars in our galaxy. I was the moon and my best friend the sun. We still revolve around each other’s axis and my system kept growing during the course of my life. I never thought much of it and kept it mainly to myself until I stumbled upon the mythology of the Licanantaí, the indigenous people who have lived in the Atacama desert in Chile for more than 2000 years. Their mythology revolves around the array of volcanoes that borders the desert on the east. The sun and all the planets and stars rise behind it. They too play a vital role in the mythology. It reminded me of my own system and I started understanding it as a mythology as well.”
—Hanna Mattes

Mexico City

“During my residency at Casa Lü in Mexico City in 2021, I was interested in the subject matter of water and its political, economical and historical importance to Mexico and Mexico City. As part of it, I researched and compared the mythologies of the Aztec water deity Chalchiuhtlicue and the catholic Virgen Guadalupe. The latter, painted with a belt which symbolizes her pregnancy, stands for fertility just as Chalchiuhtlicue, the goddess of the horizontal waters and guardian of the newborn. Fertility and water are of course tightly connected not only in mythology but also in agriculture; to put it bluntly: without water (or women) we don’t exist. As part of this research, I photographed Mexican women in my surrounding and painted a colorful halo around them, alluding to the common catholic virgin representation. The results are intuitive portraits of modern Mexican women, conscious of their diverse heritage.”
—Hanna Mattes

Searching for the Cold Spot

Searching for the Cold Spot carries us off into a magical world. In analogue photographs, Hanna captures meteorite craters, stones of cosmic origin, as well as breathtakingly filigreed minerals. She travelled through large parts of the USA on her search for craters that were created by the impact of meteorites. Here, her photographs—occasionally transformed through the use of watercolour—capture the mysteries and stunning relics without robbing them of their secrets or their fascination.

Supernatural

Encounters

Inspired by early photographers, spiritualists, and psychologists around 1900, these works document abandoned landscapes, where the apparently ‘natural’ merges—through analogue image manipulation—with supernatural manifestations, glowing spheres, and peculiar light phenomena. Here, Hanna employs a technique that was already used by fin de siècle photographers to ‘prove’ extraterrestrial and irrational phenomena, such as apparitions and auras. She produces superimpositions and collages, then retouches the negatives directly. By manipulating and displacing reality, these bizarre scenes challenge our rational perception of the material world and leave behind a sense of awe.

Day for Night

For me photography is at its best when you don’t know whether it is photography or not. Enjoying the uncertainty, questioning the circumstances and subject presented before me, photographer Hanna Mattes ‘Nightscapes’ & ‘Day For Night’ series do exactly that. While inviting such an inquisitive response, Hanna’s images simultaneously offer beautiful landscapes crafted from vivid light sources and meandering forms, a successful combination so often strived for, but rarely achieved.
—Wandering Bears Blog

pre-2009 photographic series 

Fleetstreet

Mapping My Hollywood

True Lies 

Holiday in Italy

Publications

Take Me to That Landscape

With images and poems by Hanna Mattes and including essays by Irmgard Emmelhainz and David Rothenberg that shed a light on two specific aspects of Take Me To That Landscape: the aquatic and the erotic.

Link to Take Me to That Landscape teaser

Publisher: Living Stone Publishing
Dimensions: 14 x 24 cm
ISBN: 9783000745584

Stone

The book celebrates the beauty of rocks, stones and pebbles. It shines a light on ordinary objects and questions the value we give to things. What determines the price of a stone is commonly based on beauty (its clarity, colour and cut), rarity, durability, demand, tradition and portability. Based on this logic, it could be said that any rock could be classified as a gemstone if it meets the above criteria. If they are presented like gemstones, perhaps they are?

Why is a mineral or a diamond, that can be bought in a store, more precious than a pebble found on a London street? Provided the latter is connected to a specific memory, place or time it could possibly have more meaning and thus (personal) value to us. Jung explains: “{We} have collected stones since the beginning of time and have apparently assumed that certain ones were the containers of the life-force with all its mystery.”

Publisher: Self Published, 2022
Author: Hanna Mattes, excerpts from C.G. Jung: Man and His Symbols (1964)
Photographer: Hanna Mattes, Louise West
Graphic Design: Louise West
Format: Handbound Riso print brochure
Size: 15 x 21 cm
Edition: 100 copies

The Lunar System

Published by: Deutscher Kunstverlag
Concept: Hanna Mattes, Belmacz, Harris Blondman
Text: Hanna Mattes Copy-editing: Linda Theodorou
Graphic Design: Studio Harris Blondman Lithography: Wolfgang Hückel
Printed: Tallina Raamatutrükikoja Oü, Tallin, Estonia

Hardcover, edition of 550
120 pages with 80 colour illustrations
20.4 x 33 cm
ISBN 978-3-947858-08-8

Searching for the Cold Spot

In mythological accounts meteorites are described as magical bridges between heaven and earth. This reflects their remarkable property of bringing about both destruction and life. Depending on a meteorite’s size, its strike can be as powerful as an atomic bomb. It has the potential to destroy life and devastate the surrounding landscape. At the same time, we now know that meteorites were responsible for bringing water and amino acids – the main ingredients of human life – to the young planet Earth. The images in this book are analog photos of stones and craters taken over the course of three years. Hanna scrutinized the mineral collection of natural history museums in Harlem, Berlin, London and New York, selecting and recording specimens, and travelled to Upheaval Dome, Barringer Crater, Sunset Crater, and Ubehebe Crater to photograph these impact sites where meteorites struck long ago. She later transformed the negatives of meteorites using watercolors, creating images that merge painting and photography.

Published on the occasion of Hanna Mattes’ first UK exhibition Searching for the Cold Spot, Belmacz.
Published by Deutscher Kunstverlag
Concept: Hanna Mattes, Belmacz, Harris Blondman
Text: David Colosi (English)
Printed: Drukkerij Roelof, Enschede

120 pages with 80 colour illustrations
20.4 x 33 cm,
Hardcover
ISBN 978-3-422-07418-7

press and texts

My Mind Will Travel Where My Body Can’t Go |  Chantal van Genderen

On the work of Hanna Mattes | Daniela Hahn and Andrea Lehsiak

Photographs From ‘Encounters’ Are Otherworldly | moray mair

About pictures that are filmscenes | Annemieke Gerrist

exhibition history