GAGOSIAN GALLERY 17-19 DAVIES STREET LONDON W1K 3DE GALLERY HOURS:
VERA LUTTER
TT. 020.7493.3020 F. 020.7493.3025 Mon – Sat 10:00am – 6:00pm

G A G O S I A N G A L L E R Y

Tuesday, 12 April – Saturday, 21 May 2011 Opening reception: Tuesday, April 12th, from 6 to 8 pm

It is fascinating to me that these enormous buildings have been left alone and are in a natural state of deterioration within the magical landscape of the desert. –Vera Lutter

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present photographs from Vera Lutter’s Egypt series.

In Lutter’s conceptual approach to the camera obscura, the apparatus records the outside world in a direct and immediate way. By choosing to retain the negative image as her final printed work, Lutter transforms the visual facts of her chosen environments into scenes reflecting on the twin realities of space and time. Her exposures can take days, or in some cases months, to produce and correlate with the scale of the photograph. Akin to x-rays, in these exposures the most stable and permanent aspects of environments emerge as spectral foci. And nowhere is this relationship between time and form more pronounced than in the recordings of the massive buildings that populate the deserts of Egypt.

Lutter’s Egypt series is as much a record of undisturbed ancient architecture as the scope of restrictions and prohibitions that she encountered. She produced these photographs using an empty suitcase transformed into a covert camera obscura, lined with photosensitive paper. Thus each of these works conforms to the dimensions of the improvised device, producing a scale that is much more intimate than in previous series.

Traveling through Egypt in early 2010 Lutter’s experiences with local laws forbidding photography of these monuments and suspicion of her photographic apparatus guided her to the pyramids and landscapes that she finally chose as her subjects. Largely preserved by national regulations, these timeless and enigmatic monuments, including the Meidum Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid in Dahshur, appear splendidly isolated, devoid of any trace of contemporary life. Lutter also gained rare access to the Kom Ombo Temple, where she captures tourists as barely perceptible specters against the majestic architectural backdrop.

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Vera Lutter was born in Germany and lives and works in New York. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Neue Galerie New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Major solo exhibitions include Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1999); Kunsthalle Basel (2001). Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2002); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2004); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2005); and Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2008). In the summer of 2012, Carré d’art Musée d’Art contemporain in Nimes will open a retrospective of Lutter’s work; and this past year, Lutter was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, the world’s leading prize in photography and sustainability.
For further inquiries please contact the gallery at london@gagosian.com or at +44.207.493.3020.

Inspired by the city’s presence, light, and architecture, Lutter began experimenting with photography. In order to capture an immediate and direct imprint of her experience, Lutter decided to turn the room in which she lived into a large pinhole camera—thereby transforming the space that contained her personal experience into the apparatus that would capture an image of it. Through a simple pinhole instead of an optically carved lens, the outside world flooded the interior of the room and projected an inverted image onto the opposite wall. Exposing directly onto wall-size sheets of photographic paper, the artist achieved large-scale black and white images. Maintaining her concept of directness and least possible alteration, Lutter decided to retain the negative image and refrain from multiplication or reproduction.

New York remains Vera Lutter’s home since 1993 and a returning subject in her work, yet she soon started working internationally employing the technique of the camera obscura, or pinhole camera, in projects around the world where she photographically rendered architecture, shipyards, airports, and abandoned factories, focusing on industrial sites that pertain to transportation and fabrication.

Lutter’s images have been exhibited in group and solo shows in many recognized institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dia: Beacon and Dia: Chelsea, New York; Kunsthalle, Basel; the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Neue Galerie New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. The photographer is represented by Gagosian Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, and Galerie Xippas.

Her work has been recognized by many periodicals including Artforum, ARTNews, Art in America, BOMB, and The New York Times; as well as books including 100 Contemporary Artists (Taschen), The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson), and Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (Phaidon). Lutter had the honor of receiving the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2001, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Grant in 1993.

Andrea has a degree in Public Relations from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and is working towards professional certificates in Fine Art Appraising and Art Business at New York University.