Located in the heart of Karlsruhe, Germany. A vibrant cultural city in the border triangle of Germany, Switzerland, and France. DCS CONTEMPORARY produces exhibitions, publications, discursive, and learning experiences to forge an interpretive understanding of local and global phenomena in art and society.

The gallery works with talented local and global artists of renowned stature and offers spaces to young artists it considers promising. We support our artists in dynamic exhibitions and projects and pay special attention to our audiences and clients’ intellectual and aesthetic interests. Creating bridges between artists and art passionate.

With over 20 years of experience in the arts, Founder and Director Dr. Dana Corina Schmidt embrace diasporic voices, utilizing the space as a platform for exhibitions, museum visitations, public lectures, performing arts, new media. As well as a meeting point for artists, curators, scholars, and writers.

Contemporary Art Gallery

Karlstrasse 43, 76133 Karlsruhe
E: gallery@dcscontemporary.com www.dcscontemporary.com

Andre Wagner

André Wagner

André Wagner (b. 1980, Germany) lives and works in Potsdam. He is an internationally active photo artist whose work spans more than two decades and explores themes of time, spirituality, and perception. His large-format, strictly limited works combine long exposures, infrared photography, and experimental use of light to create a visual dialogue between presence and absence, surface and depth.

Wagner’s works are held in important private and institutional collections, including the Rothschild Bank and the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, and have been exhibited internationally-in Zurich, New York, Berlin, and at the 55th Venice Biennale, where his photograph “Coming back from Yamuna
River” was shown at Palazzo Bembo.

In addition to his artistic work, Wagner is active in the field of public art, realizing site-specific projects that integrate architecture, spatial impact, and visual language. He is also one of the early photographic artists to integrate NFTs and blockchain technology into limited art editions.

Wagner is a member of the Brandenburg Association of Visual Artists (since 2024), the German Society for Photography (since 2020), and the Neue Atelierhaus Panzerhalle (since 2017). In 2022, he founded the initiative Artists for Charity, through which he supports educational and healthcare projects in India.

His ongoing series “Eternal Pilgrimage – The Spiritual Paths of India” is presented here for the first time in its entirety. Created between 2004 and 2024, the works follow Wagner’s photographic journeys to sacred sites such as Vrindavan, Mayapur, Varanasi, and Puri. The series engages with ritual spaces and moments of stillness, capturing fleeting expressions of time and devotion.

Combining long exposures with the deliberate use of flash, Wagner documents pilgrims on ancient paths. His works speak to the continuity of spiritual tradition and the presence of the invisible. Rather than conventional documentation, his photographs are visual meditations-shaped by light, shadow, and atmosphere.

Artist Statement

 

“The invisible is the spiritual-and photography is my attempt to make its traces visible.”

My work exists in the tension between the visible and the hidden. Sacred sites are not objects of analysis in my photographs, but resonant spaces where the imperceptible becomes tangible.

I return to these places again and again-not to explain them, but to connect with them. Using flash in darkness, I illuminate fleeting moments in which something ancient and timeless becomes present.

Through long exposures, I allow time itself to take form. The resulting images are quiet collaborations with the place, the moment, and the atmosphere. They invite pause. They do not speak loudly, but create space-for stillness, for reflection, and for a subtle connection between the human and the eternal.

Portfolio