Beate Gutschow: S

At first glance, the large-format black-and-white photographs by Beate Gütschow (*1970 inMainz) are reminiscent of authentic documentations of urban scenes: monumental architecture, decaying buildings, rusty automobile parts. Yet the images are the result of complex digital manipulation: they are montages consisting of numerous photos taken by Gütschow on her various journeys and later assembled to create a single picture. They are often fragments of aging modern architecture—plain, unadorned concrete buildings, now crumbling and in part non-functional.

In this way, the artist thematizes ideas that have survived modernity while she also explores and scrutinizes the medium of photography as a representative of reality.