VERA LUTTER | Rock, El Kaab: January 24, 2010

Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery, New York

Vera Lutter was born in 1960 in Kaiserslautern, Germany where she received her degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich in 1991. Thereafter she moved to New York where she was inspired by the architecture and light of the city. Thus, she began to experiment with the medium of pinhole photography. She transformed an entire room of her New York City apartment into a camera obscura by blacking out all her windows except for a tiny pinhole, allowing the darkness to reveal the outside view, upside down and reversed, on the opposite wall. The process of capturing an image took hours. Expanding beyond scenes of daily life outside her apartment, Lutter’s glowing black and white photographs include images of urban centers, industrial landscapes, abandoned factories and transit centers around the world. Lutter has received numerous prestigious awards, grants, and fellowships for her work, including the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst Grant, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Kunsthaus Zürich. The art of photography is widely associated with capturing a single moment in time, yet Lutter’s work suggests that our current lives cannot be separated from history, and the present is not free from the past.