Sascha Weidner

Sascha Weidner lived 1976-2015, born in Osnabrück, Germany. He studied Photography, Painting and Communication Design at the University of the Arts in Brunswick, Germany. Sascha Weidner´s Hanami (literally “flower viewing”) cycle of pictures follows the Japanese traditional custom of enjoying – once a year in springtime – the transient beauty of flowers. “Flower” in this case almost always meaning cherry blossoms. The way nature constantly reconstructs and renews itself, adapting to the most various situations, can also be exemplary of industry – recreating itself in groupings and connections, blossoming in all its glory and withering away, paying tribute to new conditions – the cycle of natural evolution thus going hand in hand with the industrial revolution. It is about life and death, and the short period in between when we as humans are supposed to blossom. His work deals with the ”search of a refuge, where utopia orchestrates reality and viceversa”. He has won numerous prestigious awards, such as the Award for Photographic Art of the Alison & Peter Klein Foundation and in 2010 he won the Berlin Art Prize, awarded by the Academy of the Arts Berlin. Weidner’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions as well as in public and private collections. Since tomorrow was his solo show at C/O Berlin, Germany in 2011. In 2014 Sascha Weidner has been named as the inaugural winner of the entrepreneur 4.0 award. The work for the exhibition Aokigahara also arose during his residency program at the Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto, Japan. In 2012 he was appointed a member of the German Photographic Society. Sascha Weidner was finalist of the Otto-Steinert-preis 2013.