Semjon Contemporary time will for the first particpate at MIA Photo Fair Milano with a solo stand by German artist Gerda Schütte, who has been living in Paris for 40 years.

With the rise of digital photography the artist Gerda Schütte laid aside the camera as her working tool and began working solely with light and light-sensitive paper in the dark room.

She creates entirely new visual worlds that are not intended to reproduce objects, but become visual and abstract signs and aesthetic experiences. The perfectionist prefers to focus on the dynamism of the visual quest. Her oeuvre belongs to the circle of great abstract photography. Recently her works have been featured in some important exhibitions, for example in Alchemie in the Berlin Kulturforum and in her retrospective exhibition at Semjon Contemporary, accompanied by a photography volume published by Kehrer Verlag.

Analogous Photography
At MIA Photo Fair Milano we will exhibit the series Les Signes de vie from 1990 tracing back the beginning of her photographic creative activity since 1989. Les Signes de vie may serve to illustrate how the artist, by use of creative and interpretative means, creates new visual worlds through intentional overexposure, making it difficult to imagine that they were created in close engagement with the model. Schütte has been interested in moving beyond figurative photography to define her own process of transforming the depicted content into abstract signs, despite originally working with a nude model.

Photograms
At the latest since 2002 Gerda Schütte has been working with the photograms and developing successive series, either abstract ones as the series Souvenirs d'afrique-2017 Luminosité, distinguished by the reduction of form, or showing vegetal floral motifs (as in the series Spring or the diptych Surfeuil sauvages, thus stretching the genre of photography and the technique of the photogram to its limits, making the observers ask themselves whether it may be a watercolour or a drawing they are confronted with. The series of the Ébullitions or the Abysses are a result of her alchemist experiments in the darkroom and leave the observer wondering again how these could be photograms.

Book Signing at MIA
Saturday, March 10, 3 pm at B40
Alongside the retrospective gallery exhibition the extensive volume Gerda Schütte – Photography was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2017 in German, French and English, comprising 192 pages, numerous duotones and some colour illustrations. The volume is complemented by an essay on her photograms by Ludger Derenthal, head of the photographic collection of the Berlin Art Library. The interview with the artist, conducted via e-mail in April and May 2017 by Matthias Harder, curator at the Helmut Newton Foundation, provides insights into her artistic practice and her self-image as an artist.

Semjon H. N. Semjon +49-175-208 23 39, MIA online catalog: http://www.linky.am/go/MIA2018/2524