Beate Gütschow

Beate Gütschow assembles realistic pictures by digitally manipulating photographs. She first gained recognition with laconic photographs recreating idyllic landscapes; for the last year, she has worked with architectural subjects. This sampling technique is not immediately obvious in her pictures; instead one is presented with locations at once believable and oddly unreal: These are places that belong to no place. In their seamlessness, the photographs are semantically closed; they are worlds shorn off from reality. To create them, Gütschow first searches through photographic archives and books looking for examples of destroyed or dilapidated buildings that have a vaguely modernist look. Seventies Balkan architecture is a dependable font of source material, but she is just as likely to use buildings from New York, Los Angeles, Warsaw, London, or Berlin. And even if we know these cities, in Gütschow’s pictures they are largely unrecognizable—give-away details, such as American trash cans, British-style mailboxes, or identifiable license places have been removed. This uprooted architecture is literally an unreal “international style” that consistently moves her pictures towards anonymity and virtual displacement.

Translated from the German by Jane Brodie.