This exhibition of works by German artist Beate Gütschow and New Zealander Fiona Amundsen is an inspired pairing by curator Charlotte Huddleston. Both photographers scrutinise the cultural construction of space, but their strategies and attitudes are poles apart.
The larger room of St Paul St Gallery is occupied by Gütschow’s work: eight immense digital prints, four framed black-and-whites (the ‘S’, for Stadt or City series) and four colour prints (the ‘LS’, for Landscape Series). Though ostensibly photography—and indeed the digital images are composed of many collaged or jig-sawed fragments of analogue photographs—Gütschow’s images feel a lot like paintings. The ‘S’ images tap historical combinations of perspectival exercises with classical or neoclassical architecture. Their mammoth, out-of-scale buildings (usually one per image), set in desolate wastelands, feel especially like Giorgio De Chirico’s surrealist landscapes. Gütschow’s architectures, however, are more modernist, more brutalist, and monumental enough to have a strong space-age-apocalypse flavour. They could be the covers of sci-fi novels. Or, in their monochrome industrialism, hypertrophied Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs. The serene, stiff-treed ‘LS’ images, meanwhile, reference a different painting history—the pastoral and picturesque—even including blink-and-you’ll-miss-them ruins of a rusty corrugated tin variety.
Affectively, both of Gütschow’s series are cool and alienating. It is as though some impenetrable membrane is stretched over each image’s surface, permitting no purchase, no point of entry into its world. This effect arises partly, perhaps, because the grand landscapes themselves—especially the black and white urban ones—are fake, fantastical, beyond the realm of experience. Perhaps also because the figures in the images seem lost. But the alienation effect stems primarily from the creation of a vision or perception that is not quite human. There are no convincing vanishing