Galeria de Santa Maria Maior

R. da Madalena 147, 1100-006 Lisboa

14 . 10 . 2026 → 07 . 11 . 2026

monday - saturday → 03:00 pm – 08:00 pm

Artist

Serge Ecker

Serge Ecker (born 1982 in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg) is a Luxembourgish artist. He studied digital imaging, 3D animation, and visual effects at Sup’Infograph - ESRA in Nice, France, from 2002 to 2005. After working in graphic design and 3D animation, he has focused on his independent artistic practice since 2010. He lives and works in Luxembourg.

His work explores production, memory, and improvisation through the lens of new technologies. Engaging with urban environments and their transformations, he develops a practice that questions the representation of reality through processes of capture, reconstruction, and digital translation.

In Luxembourg, he has presented several notable exhibitions, including murmurare in the frame of EMOP Luxembourg at Nei Liicht Gallery Dudelange (2025), Passages at Elektron – Bridderhaus, Esch-sur-Alzette (2024, solo), Zero Panorama at Centre des arts pluriels, Ettelbrück (2020), Grexit at Abbaye de Neumünster (2016, scenography), Inertia of the Real at Centre d’Art Dominique Lang, Dudelange (2015, solo), and White Inside #1 at Casino Luxembourg – Forum for Contemporary Art (2013).

Internationally, his work has been shown in exhibitions such as What I’d Come to See Had Already Gone”(2025, with Aap Tepper, Birgit Püve) at Vabaduse Gallery, Tallinn, Transitus Immobilis at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2018, with Catherine Lorent), Breaking Invisible Structures at Technopolis, Athens (2017, solo), and Luxembourg Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice (2016).

Murmurare

With Murmurare, Serge Ecker turns away from the mere documentation of ruins to focus on what endures. Rooted in landscapes shaped by post-industrial histories—between southern Luxembourg and Estonia—the work traces the subtle persistence of human presence, now ghost-like, as nature reclaims and reshapes its territory. These images speak simultaneously of resilience and withdrawal, of what has disappeared yet continues to resonate.

At its core, the project unfolds within the tension between absence and presence. Photography does not simply attest to loss; it affirms that something has been. In this sense, Ecker’s practice engages with a broader artistic and philosophical lineage, where the visible becomes a threshold to what eludes us.

A discreet echo of Andreï Tarkovsky’s Stalker runs through the work. Some of the sites photographed in Estonia recall locations used in the film, extending its atmosphere of indeterminacy—zones where the boundaries of reality seem suspended. This cinematic resonance reinforces the sense of spaces marked as much by memory as by transformation.

Returning to photography as a primary medium, Murmurare marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s trajectory. It reflects an ongoing questioning—of artistic legitimacy, but also of a world marked by vulnerability and transience. This underlying unease lends the work both an intimate depth and a collective relevance.

The singularity of Murmurare lies in its reflective dimension. Nature, here, operates as a mirror—projecting an inner landscape shaped by absence, fragility, and doubt, yet also by irony and critical distance. While grounded in personal experience, the work expands beyond it, engaging with the shared anxieties of our time.

Far from any apocalyptic or didactic stance, Murmurare proposes instead a quiet form of reconciliation: between past and present, between what remains and what fades. It gestures toward a delicate balance—an attentive, almost meditative way of inhabiting a world that is, by nature, unstable.