Robert Voit Biography

Robert Voit became known to a wider public with his series 'New Trees', a documentary about mobile phone masts camouflaged all over the world with giant coniferous tree, palm and cactus covers or, as can be seen in his series 'Fake America - Great Again', disguised as flagpoles or even church crosses. 
In his black-and-white series 'The Alphabet of New Plants', based on Karl Blossfeldt's original forms of art from 1928, Voit continues his photographic analysis of deceptions and fakes: only at second glance does the observer recognize the artificial flowers as they are mass-produced by industry for decorative purposes.

Since 2012, Robert Voit has travelled year after year to Japan to photographically document the consequences of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima in a long-term work.

Robert Voit, born 1969 in Erlangen, studied with Gerd Winner at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich before becoming Thomas Ruff's master class student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2001. From 2011 to 2013 Robert Voit taught as a lecturer and guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. With New Trees (Steidl, 2014) and The Alphabet of New Plants (Hatje Cantz, 2015), he presented two highly acclaimed monographs, each of which was awarded the German Photo Book Prize in silver. Robert Voit has received numerous prizes, including the Sophie Smoliar Award (2000), the European Architecture Photography Prize (2003), the hausderkunst Prize (2004) and the sponsorship of the International Lake Constance Conference. Robert Voit has held the photographer's residence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the artist's residence La Brea Matrix in Los Angeles. 
His work is part of numerous public and private collections, such as the MOCA, Los Angeles, Lenbachhaus, Munich, the New York Public Library, the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, USA, Stadtmuseum Munich, DZ Bank Art Collection, Frankfurt, and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, USA. Robert Voit lives in Munich.

Text courtesy Galerie—Peter—Sillem.