In her first ever solo exhibition in Austria Beate Gütschow is showing photographic works from the two series “S” (urban images) and “I” (staged interiors).
The artist began focusing on strategies of digital image construction very early on (starting in 1999 with her “LS”series of reconstructed landscape depictions) and has continually explored the relationship between media reality and photographic iconography.

Her urban spaces, which borrow from the utopia of modernity, consist of up to a hundred digitally composed individual elements, generated from the artist’s own extensive archive of analogue images. These large black-and-white photographs clearly reference the tradition of documentary photography, but in a strangely alienating way.
In her latest work entitled “I”Gütschow takes a critical yet playful look at the image culture of advertising photography, arranging profane objects (such as a car battery, an ergonomic chair, an overhead projector) in her studio to create a slightly surrealist scenario, the objects culminating aesthetically inside delicate light boxes.