Nyima 126, 2003,
Courtesy
Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin
Despite
this, her work is far from the sexual obsession that Balthus unabashedly
embellishes his portraits of girls with. Even Strba's early photographs
were the epitome of caution. The scenes never seem posed, even when the
motifs are immersed in alien, artificial colors. The formal experiment is
also a means of creating individuality in which it's only everyday life
that counts, because it's passing time that comes to expression in the
photographs: the suddenly garish makeup on the girls' faces; the first
rings beneath their eyes. In contrast with Nan Goldin's or Wolfgang
Tillmans' photographs, proximity provides no testimony to intimacy in
Strba's work. Perhaps because they lack the desire: instead of emphasizing
the obvious charms of her daughters, Strba prefers to maintain a distance.
She seldom shows the girls in detail; even in the nude photographs, the
surrounding space protects the subjects from the camera's excessive
penetration. While the works of Goldin
and Tillmans
harbor a sense of their own belonging to a particular scene and perhaps
even celebrate this, Strba is more interested in random moments. People
live together; hence, images arise. Clothed, in panties, or nude: it makes
no difference to the mother, because in the final analysis it's daily
routine for her to see her children’s bodies. In taking her photographs,
she used to look for moments "when the girls weren't quite so confident."
And today? Strba pays them for their work in front of the camera, "because
after all, they're my models."
nNyima
307, 2006,
©&Courtesy Annelies
Strba/Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin
For
a long time, the photographs were nothing more than part of an overflowing
family photo album. Indeed, Strba wound up in the art business
accidentally, as she readily admits. "I've been taking photographs ever
since I was thirteen, but I never wanted to make art." It was only in 1990
that Bernhard Bürgi, director of the Kunsthalle
Zurich, invited her to do a one-person show at the institution. "Back
then, I only had the small prints", Strba recalls, "and that was why Bürgi
asked me to enlarge them, in order to present them in a more appropriate
way in the space. That's when I had the idea to stretch the photographs
onto frames and to color them."
Les
cathédrales de monnaie 03, 2002,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
© Annelies Strba / Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London
|
Since that time, the technique has become Strba's
trademark, whether she's depicting their life at home, fleeting images of
streets in New York or Tokyo, or, more recently, her somnambulant fairy
tale scenes. Printed in ink-jet onto canvas, the works, often one and a
half by two meters in size, look like paintings in brilliant hues of
green, red, and yellow. It's a magical world that thrives on the substance
of reality. Strba's photographs were already termed "digital
Impressionism" in 2002 and shown in a group exhibition of the same name at
the Fondation Beyeler. Even the name Cathedrales
de monnaies, the title of a series of skyscrapers made in 2002 on a
trip to the USA and purchased for the Deutsche Bank London Collection, can
be described in this regard: "I was always fascinated by Claude
Monet's cathedral paintings, and in the sense, these photographs are
also an homage to the painter." The fact that she includes the modern
cathedrals of capital into her homage is a subtle dig at the market and
its constant greed for new and exciting images. All of a sudden, the
digital hypermodernity of Strba's images turn out to be a bow before the
artistic forms of the 19th century.
Nyima
246, 2005,
©&Courtesy Annelies
Strba/Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin
And
not without reason: as in the paintings of Monet or Paul
Signac, Strba is concerned with "inner images" that she seeks a
counterpart in nature for. Where Impressionism divided the colors like a
prism according to optical and physical laws, the photographer uses the
advantages of the Photoshop
program on the computer. Sometimes she lets the green of a meadow tip
over into a biting yellow; sometimes she covers Linda's face with a bluish
veil, or dissolves the contours of her now thirty-year-old daughter into a
surface of pixels. Her goal is to make some part of the unconscious
visible in these ambiguous scenes: "When I see something outside of me
that corresponds to my inner impressions, I take a photograph of it and
work these out to create an image."
Nyima
169, 2001,
Courtesy Galerie
EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin
Yet for Strba,
this special quality is by no means to be found in a single image.
Instead, she arranges her photographs into series as a sequence of
situations that are not united by a fixed concept, but whose loose
combination emphasizes the fleeting character of places, moods, and
physical states of being. In order to keep the transitions between the
images as smooth as possible, Strba changed mediums in 1997 from the photo
camera to the video camera. Here, too, her reasons were both aesthetic and
pragmatic: "I always work very fast when I'm filming something. I only
have a closer look at the pictures afterwards, when I determine the
contours and color contrasts. Actually, I only really discover the real
pictures afterwards, in the working process." One example of this was the
video of New York, which she initially made in 2000 in psychedelic,
overexposed colors. But then came September 11, "and after the attacks, my
pictures no longer seemed right, which was why I colored them all black."
What initially resembled the utopia of an empty Science Fiction city now
wore mourning. Yet the New York memorial has remained an exception in the
work of Annelies Strba: in all her other works, time casts lighter shadows.
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