VERA LUTTER

when Stones were Blooming

September 21, 2023 - November 13, 2023

Stockholm

Carling Dalenson is pleased to announce “when Stones were Blooming”, our first exhibition with German artist and photographer Vera Lutter.

"For my first solo show in Sweden, I chose works made in different ancient European sites.

I began my investigations into old artefacts in 2012 when I obtained permission to work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, photographing fragmented sculptures of ancient Greek and Roman Art. First with my camera and subsequently within my photographs- I looked carefully at old artefacts. At the Met, these artefacts were objects within the human scale, fragmented forms leaving us with only a part of the original artist’s vision. Later I worked in monumental architectural sites of ancient worship or cultural gatherings. All these investigations, large or small, were guided by the wonder around the questions why -at the time- certain forms were chosen and what the cultural and spiritual implications inherent in these artistic decisions meant to the people of those times. What did they see, what was their immediate cultural experience in the presence of these art works and monuments? How were their minds shaped by the visual and physical impact? To us remains only the view back, an exploration of the past. The immediate impression of the past cannot be regained but the wonder around it informs the curiosity driving my photographic investigations."

-Vera Lutter

Vera Lutter, Born in 1960 in Kaiserslauten, Germany, is a contemporary German photographer and artist known for her large-scale images of shipyards, airports, factories, and the Egyptian pyramids.

She graduated in 1991 from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, an  in 1993, she moved to New York and began studying in the photography and related media program at the School of Visual Arts, received her MFA in 1995.

In order to capture an immediate and direct imprint of her experience in New York, Lutter decided to turn the room in which she lived into a large pinhole camera, or camera obscura. 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 on. Exposing directly onto wall-size sheets of photographic paper, Lutter decided to retain the negative image and refrain from multiplication or reproduction, making every image unique.

Lutter’s works take hours or sometimes weeks of exposure and result in a negative print of the scene. “My way of working is very hands-off. I install the apparatus of observation, the camera, and then endure the process of observation and record whatever happens,” she has explained. “The work is essentially about the passage of time, not about ideas of representation.”

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. 

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.

Lutter lives and works in New York City.