Beate Gutschow: ZISLS

Hardcover |19.69 x 1.27 x 24.77 cm | 116 pp

Kehrer | 2017 | 9783868287479

This book presents four of Beate Gütschow’s (b.1970) series of photographic works – LS, S, Z and I.

Gütschow uses digital technology to create photographs that embody notions of landscape in the two specific eras – The Enlightenment and twentieth century Modernism – with their respective pictorial genres. These provide the subject matter for her photographic series LS and S.

In the series I, she draws on the aesthetics and techniques of advertising and product photography, demonstrating how unspectacular used objects can be transformed into covetable objects with the help of precise staging. The manipulation is created through lighting and mise-en-scène, without any digital intervention.

In her most recent series Z, she interlinks photography and drawing, taking a documentary approach for the first time. The object of her investigation is a site north of the Central Railway Station in Berlin, where the first panoptical prison in Germany once stood – a star-shaped building with a central watchtower, which was erected in 1849 and held political prisoners between 1941 and 1945. The book includes an index of all hitherto published works.

Gütschow’s  works have been presented in important institutions and are included in significant collections, including the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Berlinische Galerie, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, the Kunsthaus Zu¨rich, the SFMOMA, San Francisco, and the LACMA, Los Angeles. The artist lives and works in Berlin and Cologne.