Architectural Digest: Markus Brunetti Exquisitely Photographs the Cathedrals of Europe

The German artist exhibits for the first time in the U.S.

Over the last ten years, German artist Markus Brunetti has traveled Europe, capturing stunningly detailed images of churches, cathedrals, and cloisters across the continent and the British Isles. The resulting series is currently on display at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York in the exhibition “Facades,” the artist’s first solo show in the U.S.

Brunetti’s methodology is inspired by that of German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who meticulously documented the industrialization of their homeland. Rather than stepping back from a façade for a wide -angle shot, Brunetti gets up close, shooting each and every architectural ornament over the course of several weeks, or, in extreme cases, over the course of several years. He then stitches together these high-resolution images into massive collages—some of the prints in the exhibition are ten feet tall—and removes any hint of contemporary appendages. They thus become hyperrealistic recordings of the structures, an encyclopedic archive of religious architecture.