Nora Diehl was born and raised in Salzburg and Lower Austria.
Having spent years in Belgrade, Sarajevo, Geneva and Paris, where the artist had her first one-woman show, she now again lives in Vienna.
WHAT IT DOES WHAT IT IS
Nora Diehl is guided by unexpected perceptions in everyday life. At first glance, her work is oriented towards visual phenomena, the accidental and largely unnoticed appearance of sensual facts. Reflections, mirroring, the way light bends in water, or abstract image compositions thrown onto walls fascinate the artist.
The experience of the visual, detached from everyday realism, was crucial for the development of modernist art theories. Light and reflective water defined Impressionism; the photography of the Weimar Bauhaus explored the abstract visual language of light reflections. This focus on the visible signifies a new relationship with given reality.
Nora Diehl questions the visual impressions, examines and analyzes their materiality, their reality content. The tension between an object and the visual perception it causes is essential. To explore this tension, the artist sometimes takes extreme positions and perspectives. She subjects her impressions to strict image compositions or utilizes methodological paradigms of photography in image design, without digital manipulations. Particularly through the rotation of the image axis, double and triple exposures, as well as the possibilities of cropping from the environmental continuum, the images seem to have little connection to physical reality.
However,it only seems so. The image of a reflection in a puddle conveys, in its spontaneous manifestation, its first cause – the distorted represented environment – and its second cause, namely light, water, and the translucent asphalt.
Photography renders this material level, extending into the dynamic movement of the particles of this reality, transparent and simultaneously brings its own history of origin to the surface.
Nora Diehl’s intention focuses on the essential information in her photographs, found in the refractions and reflections. Changing the perspective reveals the detail in which the infinity of structures repeats. The image and the depicted belong to the same nature.
Daniela Hölzl
TEXTURES
„Nora Diehl offers the viewer of her photographic oeuvre a certain aesthetics of the matter, elements and geometric forms, encoded in a kind of riddle.
Through her specific visual approach, intangibles like water and shadows, layers of reflections, surfaces and textures, the interplay of colors, are being caught in their complex abstraction.
The artist’s refined sophistication leads the viewer towards a novel – ‚dis-figured’ – perspective.
It seems as if Nora Diehl intends to – with the help of her lens – transfer the viewer into her own universe.
Gisela Podreka
NORA DIEHL
“… The light of Nora Diehl´s images is bright, polychromatic, luminous, and yet it spells out the gravity of the world, once we understand her vocabulary…The artist gives time a profile. … In this way, time can no longer succumb to the archives of forgetfulness.”
Janko Ferk
ABSTRACT – REAL
Nora Diehl captures light. What’s unusual is that light itself is not visible. Light becomes visible only in connection with matter, in architecture, in nature, on everyday objects. The artist focuses on those phenomena that are constantly present and perhaps therefore receive little attention – reflections, shadows, sunlight projections. In a process more painterly than photographic, she extracts ordinary light phenomena from their daily context, turning them into protagonists of her abstract photography, into new independent concentrations of pure light.
Victoria Coeln
REFLECTIONS
Nora Diehl’s ‘Reflections’ at Stift Klosterneuburg. As the title ‘Reflections’ suggests, the main theme of photographer Nora Diehl is light, more precisely fleeting phenomena, the interplay of light and shadow on seemingly unspectacular everyday objects, or anything that light can evoke in connection with water. Almost all works in this exhibition – the most extensive with almost 60 images – reveal upon closer inspection their concrete origin, sometimes remaining mysterious. In any case, they aim to enchant the viewer and transport them into a world beyond everyday perception, a world that seems entirely foreign, although it surrounds us everywhere and at all times.
If we apply this to Nora Diehl’s works, it means: A scientist will likely explain how what we can see in the photos is created, why it looks like that, why under certain parameters such as the position of the sun, angle of incidence, time of day, and season, light produces such phenomena. However, no physicist in the world can explain the magic that these phenomena exert on the artistically sensitive individual.
What characterizes Nora Diehl’s works is that, as a photographer, she naturally manages to freeze time in front of her subjects. Light constantly changes, water flows, time elapses. The worlds she captures reveal themselves in seconds, often only in fractions of seconds. By fixing the lens on the same object’s different states of reflections and refractions in the series presented here, it accentuates their transience. Janko Ferk has said about her pictures, “She gives time a profile.”
Wolfgang Christian Huber
YOUR SEA IS MY HUGE INSPIRATION
ZADAR- Yesterday evening in the atrium of the Rector’s Palace we witnessed the opening of the Shadows and Glances; A Photographic Journey by Nora Diehl the exhibition of the austrian photographer Nora Diehl.
The exhibit includes more than 60 photographic works made by the famous Vienna based artist and cosmopolitan who stated the following for our newspaper:
“All my works are abstract and the biggest inspiration is your sea. It gives a lot of reflections and shadows. Generally I’m at most fascinated by your nature which gives me a lot of motifs for photographing. The works are created in the period from 2006 till today” – says Diehl sharing only compliments to our city- “People from Zadar are all very friendly and the city itself sends only good vibrations. I learned Croatian living in Sarajevo and Dubrovnik although I still have to practice.” – replied the artist smiling.
Nora Diehl was born and raised in Salzburg, Lower Austria. Since early childhood she’s surrounded by art, more precisely with the paintings of her grandfather – Hans Diehl-Wallendorf, the famous academic painter and one of the founders of The Segantini Group. Her artistic feat starts with individual exhibits in various European cities such as Paris, Geneva, Sarajevo, Belgrade and others. Photographic elegance, creative curiosity and fascination with Croatia bring the artist for the first time in Zadar. Diehl’s oeuvre is the answer on her amazement with light; its secret ways, encounters and intimacy with surfaces and textures of everyday, seemingly boring objects. The imminence of contact between light and surface of a table, chair or a piece of glass witnesses the secret light of light which in spite our busy sight creates a mysterious world full of wonder and unreal beauty.
Critics say Nora Diehl offers “… the viewer a certain aesthetics of the matter, elements and geometric forms, encoded in a kind of riddle. Through her specific visual approach, intangibles like water and shadows, layers of reflections, surfaces and textures, the interplay of colors, are being caught in their complex abstraction.”