PHILIP GRÖNING
SEEING THINGS

Never before has our trust in perception been subject to such profound erosion as it is today. AI-generated imagery and simulated realities permeate our visual field, modulating what we call “reality” and producing “alternative truths.” The intricate interplay between machine-generated, algorithmic image production and human, embodied sensory experience is fundamentally shifting the foundations of how we see. It is precisely within this tension that the work of filmmaker and media artist Philip Gröning unfolds—an inquiry into the very conditions of perception itself.

 

For years, Gröning has been working with generative and AI-based imaging processes, investigating their implications for the relationship between perception, reality, and consciousness. Emptiness as an artistic device and absence as an aesthetic strategy form core constants of his practice. His widely acclaimed film Into Great Silence (2005) is built on the principle of radical reduction: the complete absence of spoken language and music exposes the essence of the image—its pure, contemplative presence. His spatial light objects and visual works similarly oscillate between presence and withdrawal, between perceiving and the dissolution of perception.

 

An early key work of this inquiry is a group of pieces created during his 2016 residency at Villa Massimo in Rome. Gröning instructed an AI to generate a synthetic composite image from millions of publicly shared online photographs of St. Peter’s Basilica and Michelangelo’s Pietà (1499). From a distance, the resulting image appears to be a plausible, softly blurred digital reproduction. Up close, however, it disintegrates into a grotto-like texture of microscopic fragments. The algorithm compresses countless individual viewpoints into an alleged whole—but also reveals its blind spots: anything rare, accidental, or non-standard disappears as a “statistical error.”

 

The result is a diaphanous haze of imagery suspended between appearance and dissolution. For the machine, nothing exists at one hundred percent; it calculates probabilities. Gröning thus leads us toward an insight famously articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre: perception is always fragmentary, perspectival, and shaped by shadows. It is precisely this epistemic fragility that Gröning exposes.

 

This idea continues in the new series of LIDAR scans, presented publicly for the first time in Seeing Things. The delicate, pointillistic landscape fragments against deep-black backgrounds invoke a quintessentially Romantic motif—the solitary walk through nature. Created directly on site, these works use a LIDAR scanner Gröning carries on his walks. The device measures the environment with laser light and generates three-dimensional point clouds from the reflected beams.

 

Yet movement paradoxically becomes an act of concealment: every shift, every flicker of light introduces deviations. The laser constructs where it can measure—and imagines where it cannot. Gaps, overlaps, and phantom-like figures emerge, entities that never existed. Here, seeing becomes an act of creative misinterpretation—a poetic analogue to human perception itself, always partial, always incomplete.

 

A complementary inversion appears in Gröning’s analog laser drawings Reed (2024). Made in complete darkness, Gröning traced the contours of reeds using a laser pointer, capturing their movement through long exposures on analog film. In this abstract-expressive series, what we can actually perceive—light and presence—becomes the narrative of the image. Moments of presence stretch into lines otherwise invisible in everyday life.

 

Reed is Gröning’s attempt to condense selective perception into a single image—and simultaneously a counterpoint to the synthetic compositions of AI. Both bodies of work are united by the recognition that perception is always fragmented. But Gröning does not present fragmentation as a flaw; he reveals it as its own form of beauty, a genuine aesthetic of seeing.

 

 

Philip Gröning (born 1959, Düsseldorf) lives and works in Munich and Berlin. After studying psychology and medicine, he began film studies at the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF) in 1982. His feature film debut, Summer (1986), received the Kodak Award. He gained international attention in 1992 with The Terrorists, whose broadcast the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl attempted to prevent; the film won the Bronze Leopard in Locarno and screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

 

With L’amour (2000) and especially Into Great Silence (2005), Gröning became one of the defining voices in contemporary European auteur cinema. Into Great Silence achieved worldwide success, receiving numerous awards including the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, the European Film Award, the Bavarian Film Award, and multiple critics’ prizes. In 2013, his film The Police Officer’s Wife won the Special Jury Prize in Venice and the German Film Critics’ Award for Best Cinematography.

 

Gröning served as Jury President of the Orizzonti section at the Venice Film Festival (2006) and has been part of multiple international juries. Since 2001, he has taught at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and is Professor at the International Film School Cologne. In 2018/19, he held a guest professorship in Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

 

Parallel to his film career, Gröning works as a media artist, focusing intensively on artificial intelligence as a new artistic medium. He is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, where he has presented recent AI-related works. His pieces have been exhibited at Museum Villa Stuck (Munich), Tank Space (Shanghai), the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the Volkstheater Vienna, the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), and in galleries in Berlin, Vienna, and New York, as well as at major international art fairs including Art Miami and Art Chicago.

 

Gröning’s works are part of major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, the Collection of Franz, Duke of Bavaria, and the Goetz Collection.