Michel Medinger - L'ordre des choses

Michel Medinger - L'ordre des choses

In 2024, the exhibition ‘Michel Medinger, Lord of Things’., produced by Lët'z Arles with the support of the CNA, was presented at the Rencontres d'Arles as part of the Luxembourg Photography Award. Held at the Chapelle de la Charité, the exhibition attracted a large audience: 40,000 visitors were able to discover the exhibition-installation, which brought together a selection of around fifty works and objects from the artist’s collection in the form of a monumental cabinet of curiosities.

This autumn, the Arles exhibition is being reworked and presented in a new form at Pomhouse, Dudelange. Michel Medinger sadly passed away between the development of this project and the exhibition, so we are doubly keen to showcase his works and pay tribute to this great artist.

An extravagant alchemist and former Olympic athlete, Michel Medinger (1941-2025) is now considered one of Luxembourg's most important photographers. Self-taught, he draws his references from the golden age of Dutch painting, with a detour via the Surrealists and Dadaists. His admiration for classical painting and 17th-century vanitas paintings inspired his photographic still life scenes.

Working for the Luxembourg government laboratories and trained as a chemist, Michel Medinger developed his own prints, constantly guided by his curiosity and sense of perfectionism. In his laboratory, he experimented with a wide range of processes as well as his own chemical formulas, and revisited old printing techniques such as cyanotype, Cibachrome, platinotype, solarisation and Polaroid transfer, testing the infinite chromatic possibilities of selenium and uranium toning.

Each of his photographs is the result of long reflection and carefully crafted staging, composed from his fabulous and whimsical collection of objects that he has accumulated over the years. Old tools, bird skeletons, plastic toys, wilted flowers, skulls, trinkets, and even anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables. He handles this entire alphabet with humour and a touch of irreverence. The strange and incongruous associations of objects he imagines create images where fantasy, eroticism and death coexist. By playfully diverting objects from their primary function, they take on new meanings. These “object-actors” shift our gaze, summon our imagination and highlight the artist's interest in the big questions of the human condition. The still lifes that the artist has been photographing for over forty years have become emblematic of Michel Medinger.'s work. His allegorical works celebrate the precariousness, fragility and beauty of existence.