Michael Köster (*1960 in Berlin), has been involved in photography since the mid-1980s. He trained himself autodidactically, initially working in analog.
The switch to digital photography took place in 2010. Köster describes the digital artistic possibilities of post-processing his photographs as a particular turning point. This enabled the artist to develop his own artistic style. The dramaturgy of light and shadow is an essential element in enhancing the mood of the image.

Köster's formal language reveals influences of New Objectivity photography as well as those of Film Noir. But associations with painting also arise when viewing some of the staged images, whose atmosphere is reminiscent of the enigmatic mood of inanimate and stillness in Pittura Metafisica paintings.

The fact that the motifs develop such a haunting presence in the course of the editing process on the computer is partly due to the fact that Michael Köster isolates the buildings on which he focuses. They are detached from their real urban contexts in which they normally stand - the buildings around them, for example. The process of alienation that this entails is heightened by the fact that the artist often places his motifs in a fictitious dark or evening or nocturnal setting.

Köster's motifs seem to lead a life of their own. They confront us in a mixture of strangeness, distance, and intimacy that is as enigmatic as it is haunting. We, the viewers of the paintings, enter a visionary space, beyond our