Monday, February 1, 2010

NEW ARTIST POST: 2/1/2010 Beate Gutschow







Beate Gutschow
website: unknown
interview with Creative Face magazine: link to interview
gallery representation unknown.

About Beate Gutschow: She was born in Mainz, Germany in 1970. Gutschow went to the School of Fine Arts in Oslo, Germany, as well as, the School of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany. She is widely know and has show her work across Europe and the United States. She took part in an Artist Residency at ArtSway and has shown her work at the Contemporary Museum of Photography in Chicago.

About Beate Gutschow's work: Gutschow's works is really about challenging the ideas of truth and fiction. In this series, LS Gutschow has constructed images of landscapes. In the images of "natural landscapes" she has collaged images to create the perfect landscape based of the rules of painting landscape from the 17th and 18th century masters. The construction and composition of these images give us clues to the "created" reality that Gutschow is presenting to us. The nature landscapes are cast after painting from the 17th and 18th century while the building landscapes are fabricated and have no clues to an actual location. Also the building landscapes were shot with black and white film and the grain becomes an evidence to the changes in the imagery. Gutschow expresses that she wants the viewer to question it, to ask questions about what it is, what it can mean or be.  

 “Landscape (nature) never looked like this. In my work ideal means not to exclude the
ugliness, it means to construct reality.”- I like this quote from Gutschow because she speaks of creating Reality... instead of creating fiction or a false view.

"What's important to me is the relationship between reality and fiction. I'm also interested in the expectation we have of photography: that, no matter what else, photographs represent a slice of reality. At first glance my photos seem to do this too, but then you quickly sense that something's not right. What you see in these images can't be attributed to any particular place, and eventually you realise that this is not a homogeneous representation of reality. " - From interview link above.

I find that I really appreciate this work because it does make me question it. I wonder where this could exist and what the people are doing within the photographs. i found myself comparing the black and white building landscapes and the nature landscapes to each other. And I really like this artist because she is creating something that never existed in our world but she still calls is reality. It reminds me of my own work because I am trying to piece together scenes to show the movement of time. Even though she is trying to create questions of authenticity in her work, I am trying to create questions of time and where it all goes if you waste it.


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