German artist Julius von Bismarck, the great-great-great-grandnephew of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, has opened a major solo exhibition titled "Normal Catastrophes" at the Kunsthaus Wien. The show demonstrates his unique approach to transforming natural disasters into art through years of scientific research and dangerous fieldwork, creating stunning visual works that capture storms, lightning, massive waves, and wildfires.

Born in 1983, Bismarck functions as both artist and researcher, with preparations for his works often taking years and forming an active part of the artistic process. For his lightning photography project, he first searched for a particularly storm-prone area, which he found in Venezuela. After numerous trips to research laboratories and storm zones, he developed elegant, slender lightning rockets made of aluminum with silvered grounding cables woven from Kevlar and copper. "By shooting these into the clouds during a thunderstorm, the charge can be transported from the earth closer to the storm," Bismarck explains during a gallery tour. "It creates a kind of mountain."

The artist emphasizes that these rocket objects are not actually art but rather tools for taming lightning. Equipped with integrated tracking devices and parachutes, they are reusable. His preparation process even included conversations with indigenous people who "see lightning as beings you can communicate with." Despite all this elaborate preparation, the project ultimately yielded exactly three photographs.

Far less time-consuming but significantly more dangerous was his approach to capturing an extreme slow-motion video of a gigantic wave. He traveled to Ireland and called every port until he found a daring fisherman willing to venture into the raging sea with him. "We were almost ready to give up," he recalls, "then I managed to capture just over a second of video footage with the high-speed camera." In extreme slow motion, the wave now appears like a threateningly beautiful rock wall, massive and impenetrable.

The fire photographs displayed on the upper floor were taken in Los Angeles during the devastating fires of early 2025. "I wanted to present a different image of this catastrophe than what the media was showing," Bismarck says. He shows what remains after the fire passes. In another series, he aims to reveal "the delicate beauty of forest fires" to viewers.

This aestheticization of catastrophe raises important questions about whether such beautiful imagery might seduce viewers rather than emphasizing the crisis mode of these disasters. "Yes, but I love problems," Bismarck responds matter-of-factly. The exhibition title "Normal Catastrophes" provides a crucial hint: experienced disasters often lead to a fatigue that serves as self-protection, making us perceive horror as normal. "Art can suggest a different path: we are moved without feeling overwhelmed," he explains.

Bismarck is confident that "every image has an effect" and influences our perception, just like Romantic paintings continue to do today. He believes our thinking and understanding of nature are deeply shaped by images, starting with the very concept of "landscape" - a painting category that has led to postcard views while nature simultaneously faces threats from mass tourism to climate change.

The artist seeks to make these processes conscious and create new images that destroy clichés and sensitize viewers. For this purpose, he whipped the sea until exhaustion in his work "Punishment." Historically, this references an anecdote from pre-Christian times when King Xerxes ordered the sea to be punished with 300 lashes. However, Bismarck sees this primarily as an attack on the landscape image itself. In his work, nature is not a backdrop or symbol of an emotional state, but something alive - a physical opponent that can hardly be controlled.

Not all of his works are based on the aesthetics of terror, but they follow his motto that all images are constructions of historical narratives. He had a huge canvas, previously painted with wave lines on the beach, float in the sea - specifically in the Bismarck Sea, a small marginal sea in the Pacific Ocean. This area was part of a German colony in the late 19th century and was named after the first Chancellor of the German Reich - the artist's great-great-great-granduncle. Instead of reporting on the atrocities of colonial masters, print graphics of that era delivered idealized imagery, which his new landscape painting addresses while simultaneously, as he once said, "dealing with the eternal questions about his name."