MCA Denver will present work by the Austrian photographer and poet Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003), who dedicated his life to documenting the remnants of Nazism and the Holocaust. His photographs look away from the scenes usually associated with the Shoah—barracks, gates, train tracks—and focus instead on the minute and incidental traces left behind in the Austrian landscape: indentations in stone, twisted steel rods and concrete foundations. His works’ examination of Austrian history belongs to his self-critical reflection on his enthusiastic participation, as a teenager, in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party. Heimrad Bäcker: Landscape M focuses on Bäcker’s works related to Mauthausen, the largest concentration camp in Austria.

MCA Denver’s exhibition is the first of Bäcker’s work in the United States. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will feature a foreword by Adam Lerner and essays by Patrick Greaney and Martin Hochleitner. Ugly Duckling Presse will issue a special letterpress edition of Bäcker’s 1985 book SEASCAPE, with an afterward by Charles Bernstein. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Program in Jewish Studies and the German Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder will hold a one-day symposium in December.

As David Shneer, Louis P. Singer Professor in Jewish History and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, notes, “This important exhibition forces us to think about what it means to represent the Holocaust in photography. Heimrad Bäcker's close-ups and landscapes of Mauthausen and Gusen, taken years after the end of World War II, depict empty landscapes and mundane remnants of decaying worksites.  But the emptiness, like the nails, hooks and crumbling walls, haunts the viewer, as well as Bäcker, who both know what horrible events took place there.”
 
Curated by Patrick Greaney, Heimrad Bäcker: Landscape M will be presented in the David & Laura Merage Foundation Photography Gallery and the Chris & Lu Law Gallery from September 27, 2013 through January 5, 2014. Heimrad Bäcker (b. 1925, Vienna) received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna and was active as a publisher, writer and artist. He lived and worked in Linz, Austria.

Heimrad Bäcker: Landscape M is sponsored in part by the MCA Denver Director's Vision Society Members, the Austrian Ministry of Culture, the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles, the State of Upper Austria, the Heimrad Bäcker Society and the Colorado Creative Industries. MCA Denver also thanks the citizens of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District.