Tanztee and Erbgericht (E)
for Memo Magazine
2017
related works
Erbgericht
Tanztee
Writing in Artforum in 2004, Abigail Solomon-Godeau described the ‘miniature guillotine’ of the camera’s shutter. The camera slices a moment in time from the world, removing it from its original context, but also potentially relaunching it as a new, transformed event. In Andrea Grützner’s current exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, the German artist has focused her photographic attention on a historic guesthouse in Saxony, in the old East Germany. She expertly uses and exploits the click of the shutter to create two series of works that transform the building’s spaces and activities into striking abstract compositions. Yet in doing so, Grützner also reflects and adds to the complex layers of memory, history and ongoing lived experience that permeate this building.
The ‘Erbgericht’ guesthouse, built in the late nineteenth century, has held a longstanding fascination for Grützner. An important cultural centre for the rural community, it also embodies broader historical narratives that persist in contemporary Germany. Cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen influentially wrote about the palimpsestic-like nature of contemporary Berlin (and post-War, post-unification Germany more broadly), which is defined by complex layers of absences and presences, voids and remains. The guesthouse in Saxony reflects such complex relations, particularly its history during the period of the German Democratic Republic. While the guesthouse did not come under direct control of the state, as many buildings did, the GDR did enforce certain aesthetic impositions. This included overpainting certain architectural elements of the building – producing quite literal layers of history, memory and forgetting.
Grützner employs photography’s unique qualities to unsettle and amplify these legacies, exploring the complex connections to space and history that swirl around the guesthouse. For the series Erbgericht she spent a number of years photographing the various rooms and nooks of the house. Yet the photographs on display at CCP are far from simple documentary images. Grützner uses precisely placed lighting and coloured flashes when taking her images. These introduce choreographed washes of colour that flood and saturate certain areas and rooms. All of this is pre-planned and measured. Grützner shoots on analogue film, and with the click of the shutter she both triggers her own ephemeral layers of colour in the space, and captures them in her final images.
Flash-photography can be a harsh tool, and Grützner knowingly uses this to flatten the picture plane. Yet by inserting her splashes of colour, Grützner paradoxically reinserts new levels of depth into her final photographs. Shadows are transformed into fields of colour, layered onto the building’s architecture. While this lends an overall abstract quality to many of the images, her technique is remarkably generative; it produces a suite of photographs that are exceptionally cohesive aesthetically, and yet also very visually distinct and diverse. Some images could pass for pure digital constructions, so crisp and stark are their architectural lines and coloured voids. Other images resemble almost pure abstractions as the cropped viewpoints, indistinct objects and coloured interventions combine to create images resembling collaged (or, more currently, Photoshopped) arrangements. Grützner uses no digital or post-production alterations however; these effects are generated in camera. Her processes create complex, multiple illusions of materiality. In some of the images the slashes of colour are so dense and vivid that they almost appear to have been painted into the frame – alluding subtly to the aforementioned legacy of overpainting.
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