Born in 1960 in Kaiserslautern, Germany, Vera Lutter lives and works in New York.
Vera Lutter investigates the camera obscura and its process of recording light on photographic paper. She draws inspiration from architecture and her works explore urban landscapes, industrial sites, mythical landscapes, and the views from her artist studio. These are a selection of the many places where she reframes images to reveal different layers of spatial perception. Her large-scale photographs often require several hours or days of light exposure. She chooses to work with room-sized cameras allowing the size of the resulting image to reflect the architecture in which it was made. The prolonged exposure allows her to record images that give evidence to time passed. The resulting ephemera and movement dissolve time into the image, sometimes enabling ghostly forms to surface. These photographs don’t simply translate the real; they also reveal an intermediate world, a space of corresponding apparitions. The images radiate a fluid and otherworldly feeling that allows the gaze to drift and linger on certain details captured with startling precision.
Her work was part of numerous institutional exhibitions: at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), USA where she was artist-in-residency during 2017-2018; New Orleans Museum of Arts, USA (2016), Museum of Fine Arts Houston, USA (2015),Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes, France (2012), Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York, USA (2012), Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria (2004), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, USA (2002), among others.
Public collections (selection): The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; The Israel Museum, Jérusalem, Israël; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA; Neue Galerie, New York, NY, USA; Dia Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA; Kunsthaus, Zürich, Switzer- land; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA, USA.
