With the exhibition “Photo: Hans Hansen”, the MK&G is devoting a large-scale retrospective to one of the leading photographers in post-war Germany. From 17 April to 1 November 2026, viewers will be able to discover around 220 iconic photographs from a career spanning over six decades. In international ad campaigns for companies including Lufthansa, Nikon, Volkswagen and Erco, Hans Hansen revolutionised product photography starting in the 1960s with images that would shape the collective visual memory of entire generations. Complementing examples from these campaigns are images created in close collaboration with designers such as Tapio Wirkkala. Publications, sketches and archival material as well as selected objects from Hansen’s own private collection provide deeper insights into his world. His most recent series, “Analog” (2024), also highlights Hansen’s distinctive clean-cut and minimalist visual language.

While the world outside the photographer’s studio has been constantly changing over the past 60 years, inside, an unvarying order prevails: A place for everything and everything in its place. In his “still lifes”, Hansen reduces objects to their essence, arranging, breaking down and structuring their shapes, colours and materials. In his photos, they take on a timeless air. One of the best-known examples is the photograph of a Volkswagen Golf (1988) that has been dismantled into some 7,000 individual parts.

Hansen’s works bear an unmistakable signature, focusing the gaze with radical clarity on the everyday world of things and design. At the same time, the photographer continually searches for new pictorial solutions. Light and shadow, composition and perspective are the central parameters and elementary means with which he calls into question the very nature of photography.

Product designer Axel Kufus is responsible for the exhibition design, and the graphics were created by Heimann + Schwantes. The exhibition film was made by filmmaker Maike Mia Höhne.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Exhibition Fund of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the Hubertus Wald Stiftung, the Karin Stilke Stiftung, the Hans Brökel Stiftung für Wissenschaft und Kultur, the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States, Annegret and Claus-G. Budelmann, the Martha-Pulvermacher-Stiftung, and the Manfred Heiting Trust.

Media partner: art – Das Kunstmagazin