Andrea Grützner “Erbgericht”

Julie Saul Gallery

[Image: "Untitled 5" (2014) pigment print, 59 x 39 2/5, ed.of 5]

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Julie Saul Gallery presents Berlin based artist/photographer Andrea Grützner’s first US solo exhibition. Working with the analog process, and assorted mirrors and gels, Grützner creates straight color photgraphs that are at the same time abstract and representational, ambiguous and descriptive.

The title and subject of the exhibition, Erbgericht (Guesthouse), is a specific traditional village guesthouse in the eastern part of Germany. Grützner grew up near an Erbgericht in the village of Polenz, east of Dresden. One family has owned this specific guesthouse for five generations since 1889. She tells of the big old house, full of nooks and crannies, whose corners and and objects have the memories of generations attached to them. It’s a collage of material built over generations.

Erbgericht continues the abstract language of László Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus. Grützner creates strict rules for herself; the whole photograph, including the shadows and the composition, is taken in only one shot on analog film without any digital alteration. Through the use of color flash and the creation of strong shadow lines, the interiors look alienated and transformed to architectural details as Grützner enters into a visual dialogue with the building. “Shadows are traces and marks that have a direct relation to the object, but through the projection, these objects can appear twice as big or transformed and changed, they take on their own lives” and thus, says Andrea Grützner, “they work a lot like memories.”

Andrea Grützner lives in Berlin and is a member of the photography collective Exposure Twelve. She earned her Master of Arts degree in photography from the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences in 2014 and subsequently has shown at festivals, and in solo and group shows worldwide.

Grützner received the PhotoVision Sponsorship Award and the Source Cord Prize in 2014, as well as the LEAD Award (silver) in 2015. She was a winner of Gute Aussichten 2014/2015 – young German photography prize, and most recently FOAM Talent 2016, on view at the Unseen photo fair in September. Kerber Verlag recently published a monograph das Eck (The Corner) which was developed during the course of her scholarship in Koblenzer Stadtfotografin 2015.