Extravagant alchemist, former Olympic athlete, Michel Medinger is today one of the most important Luxembourg-based photographers.

Self-taught, he draws his references from the golden age of Dutch painting, taking a detour towards the surrealists or even the Dadaists.

Over the last four decades, the still life genre has been a joyful obsession for this great explorer of all photographic techniques, who developed all his prints in his laboratory and experimented with numerous processes, from Cibachrome to Polaroid transfer. or even the platinotype.

Each of his photographs is the result of a carefully developed staging, which he composed from his fabulous and fanciful collection of objects accumulated year after year in his house, where every corner welcomes a part of his creative mindset. His drawers are filled with old tools, bird skeletons, faded flowers, skulls, small and useless objects and even anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables. He builds a whole and personal alphabet, whose symbolic elements are borrowed from the pictorial genre of vanitas and which he handles with humor and a touch of irreverence.

The strange and incongruous associations of objects that he imagines create surprising, sometimes disturbing images, where fantasy, eroticism and death constantly coexist.

A banal everyday object suddenly takes on human form and it points out to us all the interest which the artist addresses the significant questionings of the human condition. His allegory works celebrate the precariousness, fragility and beauty of existence.

The in-situ exhibition-installation will bring together a selection of around fifty of his photographs, some of which have never been seen before, and objects from his collection, in the display of a monumental curiosity cabinet.

Sylvie Meunier