Flowering Trees (Blümenbäume)

This early study of flowering trees dates to 1925, the year that Richard Oelze left the acclaimed Bauhaus school of art, architecture, and design in Weimar and moved to Dresden, where the young artist became active in the city’s cultural life. It is also the year he first traveled to Berlin, where he met the photographer—and future Bauhaus teacher—Walter Peterhans, with whom he worked on photography experiments.

Here, Oelze has transformed what might otherwise have remained a conventional garden or landscape view into a dreamy, fantastical vision through a subtle simplification and abstraction of individual motifs and an unreal play of light and dark across the surface.