Opening May 19 at 6 p.m.
Rue des Bains 61 & Rue des Sablons 6, 1205 Geneva
The Galerie Xippas is delighted to present, for the first time in Geneva, an exhibition by Vera Lutter. For her first solo show in the city, the artist invests in the two spaces of the gallery and reveals on this occasion a set of photographs of different sizes.
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 show evidence of the 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.
Lutter’s mastery of time gives an alternative vision of mobility in the modern world, of the transformation of spaces, of transition, of transportation, and of the slow metamorphosis of cities. San Giorgio, Venice V: January 18, 2008, the famous venetian cathedral, Temple of Nettuno, Paestum, XIX: October 18, 2015, in the heart of Roma, or Empire State Building, III: November 28, 2014 are examples of landscapes that will be presented in this exhibition.
For this exhibition, Vera Lutter reveals also a photograph of her project called Clock Tower. This project took place in a building on Main Street n°1 in Brooklyn, New York, which is topped by a monumental clock tower. Constructed in 1914 on a rectangular footprint, each side of the building points to one of the four cardinal directions of the compass. The Clock Tower building is perfectly square, and each of the four sides houses a gigantic clockface. Backed with clear glass, the clocks allow for an exchange of light. During the day the large clock-windows illuminate the space within, and at night the interior space illuminates the clock faces. Through the clocks, views of four different New York neighborhoods are visible. The spinning indicators of the clocks interrupt each view and give evidence to the passage of time. In this space, Lutter recorded the four different vistas framed by the spinning indicators using a room-sized camera obscura.
Vera Lutter was born in Germany, near Düsseldorf. She studied sculpture in Munich, then received her MFA in Photography and Related Media in 1995 at the School for Visual Arts in New York, where she lives today. Her work has been the focus of large museum exhibitions at the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Kunsthaus Graz, the Dia:Beacon in New York, Le Carré d’Art in Nîmes, and recently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Vera Lutter is represented by the Galerie Xippas in Geneva, Max Hetzler Gallery in Berlin and the Gagosian Gallery in New York and Los Angeles.
