Plastic Ocean features 24 photographs of our throwaway society’s connection to our oceans, whose pollution has already reached catastrophic levels. With his pictures the artist thus processes one of the currently major environmental issues.
For Andreas Franke, who is a passionate diver, and who has repeatedly been distinguished as one of the 200 best commercial photographers in the world, this is a fundamental issue: His pictures make excessive consumerism and the ensuing ecocide not just visible, but also tangible.
He shows his models in beauty, fear and despair, surrounded by a sea of plastic waste which he gathered himself on a beach near Venice within a mere hour.
This would be haunting enough, but he has intensified the effect of his works by first exhibiting them in the very place that inspired him: In the ocean. In the summer of 2019 his pictures were mounted on a sunken ship off Key West, and during the three-month exhibition a natural ocean patina has turned each work into a distinguished one-of-a-kind piece.
From April 2nd 2020 the images will be shown Vienna for the first time.
