Beate Gütschow was born 1970 in Mainz, Germany. She studied at the School of Fine Arts in both Oslo and Hamburg. Throughout her studies she had classes with Johannes Blume and Wolfgang Tillmans. Gütschow has had work in group shows, but recently she had her first solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Colombia College Chicago, and at Danziger Projects. Currently she lives and works in Berlin.
Gütschow produces digital “constructed” photographs of both landscapes and cityscapes. She “draws on the work and traditions of Romanitic-era painters and photo legends Lewis Baltz and Bernd and Hilla Becher” (Egan, Natasha & Ono, Akiko). Although at first glance her landscapes may seem like tranquil pastoral scenes, they are actually created to raise questions of control, inauthenticity, and the pursuit of perfection. According to Egand and Ono, Gütschow’s two bodies of work “compel the viewer to think about humankind’s celebration of nature and our ceasless desire to control it.” Differing greatly at first glance from her landscapes, her cityscapes seem immediately eerie and bizarre. Gütschow’s constructed dystopian architecture has an almost recognizable qualitity to it, although eventually one realices that the scene they are looking at is actually nonexistant. However different the two series may be, they both share Gütschow’s paintstaking eye for detail. In reference to her constructed images Egan and Ono state “. . . each detail, including the subtle nuances of the palette and light, is carefully controlled, culled from an archive of images taken specifically for use in these seamless collages.”
Images:
http://www.aperture.org/store/books-preview-bio.aspx?ID=587
Review:
http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/2007/10/review_lss_by_beate_gtschow_1.html
Gallery representing artist:
http://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2007/10/beate_guetschow.php
2 comments:
gutschow is a true genius.
i can hardly wait to see some new work.
cheers.
Paul Thulin has read your blog up to this point/entry.
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