Vera Lutter Ca del Duca Venice XA – Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition dates: 24th July – 12th September 2009

Vera Lutter (American, b. 1960)
Campo Santa Sofia, Venice, XV: December 12, 2007
2007
Unique gelatin silver print
68 5/16 × 56 in
173.5 × 142.2cm

I really like this atmospheric work – the scale, the ‘grandness’ of it, the dismemberment through verticality, the immersion into inky darkness – there is something almost subterranean (man living under-earth, under-evolution) about the pictures vestigial structures.

Marcus

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Many thankx to Gagosian Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Vera Lutter (American, b. 1960)
Campo Santa Sofia, Venice, XXIII: December 17, 2007
2007
Unique gelatin silver print
85 7/16 × 112 in
217 × 284.5cm

Vera Lutter (American, b. 1960)
Ca Del Duca Sforza, Venice II: January 13-14, 2008
2008
Unique gelatin silver print
104 1/2 × 168 in
265.4 × 426.7cm

Vera Lutter (American, b. 1960)
Calle Vallaresso, Venice XXVII: January 31, 2008
2008
Unique gelatin silver print
55 3/8 × 68 1/4 in
140.7 × 173.4cm

“Instability, uncertainty, suspense, and monumentality are entities that I consider and think about; they inform my work.” ~ Vera Lutter

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of large-scale unique photographs by Vera Lutter. This is her first exhibition in Los Angeles.

In Lutter’s conceptual approach to the camera obscura, the most rudimentary form of photography, the apparatus records in a very direct and immediate way what exists in the world outside. By choosing to retain the negative image, she transforms the visual facts of her chosen environments into uncanny scenes that reflect on the two principal realities of time and space.

In recent years, Lutter has made the hauntingly romantic city of Venice an object of prolonged study. Building on her previous recordings of industrial landscapes and cities surrounded by water, such as Old Slip, New York (1995), and Cleveland (1997), the works created in Venice elaborate her intention “to create an image in which the city appears to be suspended above its own reflection, rendering a place that appears to exist outside of gravity.”

During the anticipated high-water season of 2005, Lutter captured mirage-like emanations of San Marco and Piazza Leoni in which the spectral landmarks appear to hover above their own reflected image in the placid water. Lutter returned to Venice the following year to record the area where the Grand Canal flows into the Bacino, which then opens up into the lagoon. This unstable body of water not only gives Venice its special ethereal character; it also threatens the floating city’s very existence.

Lutter revisited Venice in 2007 and 2008 to explore further the physical, technical, and architectural complexities of the city. Works such as San Giorgio (2008), Campo Santa Sofia (2007) and Calle Vallaresso (2008) reveal certain innate qualities and conditions of the city that elude direct observation and can be experienced only through her luminous incarnations, the physical image.

Text from the Gagosian Gallery website [Online] Cited 01/09/2009 no longer available online

Vera Lutter uses the camera obscura, the most basic photographic device, to render in massive form images that serve as faithful transcriptions of immense architectural spaces. The camera obscura was originally developed during the Renaissance as an aid in the recording of the visible world.

Vera Lutter is best known for monumental black-and-white photographs of cityscapes. Her unique silver gelatin prints are negatives made by transforming a room into a pinhole camera obscura chamber. Directly exposed, often over many hours, onto photosensitive paper, these vistas appear as solarised images, their ethereal platinum tones imbuing the scenes with a haunting melancholy. From an early concentration on the Manhattan skyline, Lutter has turned lately to more industrial sites, including a dry dock, a zeppelin factory, an airport runway, a marina and a deserted warehouse.

Vera Lutter Biography on the Metro Art Works website [Online] Cited 01/09/2009 no longer available online

Installation views of Vera Lutter works at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

Vera Lutter (American, b. 1960)
San Giorgio, Venice XVIII: January 26, 2008
2008
Unique gelatin silver print

Vera Lutter (American, b. 1960)
San Marco, Venice, XIX: December 1, 2005
2005
Unique gelatin silver print
92 ¼ x 112 ¾ in
234.3 x 286.4cm

Vera Lutter (American, b. 1960)
Ca’ del Duca Sforza, Venice XXXI: July 14, 2008
2008
Unique gelatin silver print
56 × 80 3/4 in
142.2 × 205.1cm

Vera Lutter (American, b. 1960)
Ca del Duca Sforza, Venice, XXXXIII: July 24, 2008
2008
Unique gelatin silver print
50 1/2 × 67 1/8 in
128.3 × 170.5cm