Born in Kaiserslautern, Germany, Vera Lutter moved to New York after receiving her diploma in 1991 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.  She went on to study at the School of Visual Arts, where she received an MFA in 1995.  Her love of New York and its ever changing cityscapes gave way to a most unique experiment.  She turned her loft into a pinhole camera and captured huge images on the interior walls.  Using large sheets of photographic paper, she was able to capture these inverted images in black and white and retained the negative images, which is what we are seeing in this self-titled exhibit currently at The Gagosian Gallery on the Upper East Side.
She has continued in this style of a unique negative print in a variety of settings such as abandoned factories, shipyards, train stations and airports. Many of her images in and around New York are sights we know well like the Pepsi Cola sign in Long Island City, the former Nabisco factory in Beacon and Ground Zero. Internationally she used this process photographing the pyramids of Egypt, the Maria Laach Benedictine Abbey in Germany, the Battersea power station in London, and the Frankfurt airport, to name just a few.
Even though her camera and her love of this art have taken her abroad, New York remains her home and has been her inspiration. In an interview she gave to Marvin Heiferman this year, she refers to the architecture and perpetual state of flux. “New York’s got an incredible energy of its own, and it’s an energy that feeds off of itself. And that’s yet another haunting quality of the pictures too.”
The eerie quality of these familiar places are displayed in large format silver gelatin prints and create a stunning exhibit in the bright and open spaces of the Upper East Side’s Gagosian Gallery. The exhibit will be on display through March 7th, located at 976 Madison Avenue near 77th Street. On May 3rd of this year, Ms Lutter will be opening at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. with the exhibit “The Memory of Time.” Her public collections also include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Neue Galerie and a plethora of other galleries both in the U.S. and Internationally.
While you are at the Gagosian Gallery, peek into the gift shop where you’ll find plexiglas-framed Andy Warhol prints, Urs Fischer ink-jet wallpaper prints, posters, art books and to our surprise, a Leica Shop featuring the Leica X2 Gagosian Edition Camera among other select Leica products.
An open winding staircase off the book shop will take you down to Kappa Masa, a collaboration between Larry Gagosian and chef Masayoshi Takayama that opened in 2014 and features sushi and Japanese fare. The Gagosian Shop is pleased to announce a book signing with Vera Lutter on Tuesday, March 3rd from 5 pm to 6 pm, when she will be signing her monographs and other publications of her work. Â RSVP if you plan on attending.
Contact the Author at AFineLyne.