"At the height of the pandemic, Oliver Kühnel's photo series "Limbus" was created, which reads like a photographic essay on the zeitgeist of the time, on experiencing deep loneliness and on love, or rather: the longing for it. Kühnel understood the collective feeling of isolation early on as the sorrowful constant noise of the pandemic years and finally gave it a photographic language with "Limbus".

Stylistically, this is underpinned by all the other-worldly allusions to actually mental experiences: A dead tree stump suddenly becomes a metaphor for our emotional "stumping off." Sleeping birds in barren treetops point us to the comatose state of our social sense of self. Radiant power lines tell of neuronal overexcitement and diverse self-portraits let us know that all this is not happening on the outside but inside the mind.

With "Limbus", Oliver Kühnel has implemented a visual language for emotional states that does without clichés and makes words superfluous. It is so concrete that we may guess that it is autobiographically readable and yet so universal that everyone may effortlessly read their own mental abysses into it."
—Kevin Wolf, 2023