Gabriele Engelhardt (b. 1967) reflects in her work on human encroachments on nature in the form of sculptures or installations. Depicted in her landscapes are mountains of scrap metal in industrial zones or ski jumps.
The artist works with the medium of photography, digitally reworking her images and combining several photos into a single composition. The works are therefore not documentations of reality. In her Berge (Mountains) series, mountains are not mountains in a geological sense, but are accumulations of materials such as metal waste or construction materials. The works are reminiscent of Claude Monet’s impressions of haystacks, but also of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies of water towers as markers of industrial decline.
Die Rohstoffe, egal was es ist, interessieren mich aus Sicht einer Bildhauerin. Diese arbeitet mit Material. Was ich da vor mir habe, ist Material. Dieses Material transformiere ich auf einer fotografischen Ebene. Nicht mit dem Gedanken, etwas Schönes daraus zu machen, sondern das Objekt in all seinen Details zu zeigen, das Material lesbar zu machen.
Gabriele Engelhardt studied sculpture at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and photography and scenography at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. In 2022, she was a guest in Krems as part of AIR – ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Niederösterreich. This is where her “Kremser Berge” project was created, set in the city’s industrial port entrance on the Danube.
AIR – ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Niederösterreich is an international fellowship program. It enables visual artists, architects, musicians, and writers to live and work in Lower Austria for a temporary period of time and experience the diversity of the local cultural landscape.
Curator: Florian Steininger