Sculpture or Photography?
German artist Gabriele Engelhardt combines photography and sculpture in her work. For her series "Kremser Berge" she photographed mountains of material in the industrial area of Krems and assembled these photos into digital collages.Sculpture or Photography?
German artist Gabriele Engelhardt combines photography and sculpture in her work. For her series "Kremser Berge" she photographed mountains of material in the industrial area of Krems and assembled these photos into digital collages. The works were created during her residency at AIR - ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Lower Austria and are currently on display at Kunsthalle Krems.
Florian Steininger, director of Kunsthalle Krems and curator of the exhibition, spoke with the artist about her sculptural approach to photography.
How did you get into photography?
I was raised in a family that was photography-heavy. My father was a repro photographer and my mother was a photo lab technician. I think it was written into my DNA. We had our own lab at home where I developed pictures as a child. The smell of developing chemicals is home to me.
Your mountain images look like factual documentary photographs, but they are not. You work in a digital collage process, arranging, overlapping, and juxtaposing individual photographs. Do you consider yourself a photographer or an image maker?
From a strictly scientific point of view, digital photography is no longer photography in the classical sense: by definition, it requires a camera with film and a chemical process to produce the images. In the long run, I would call myself a photographer, but I work with the data in the same way that sculptors work with clay or plaster. I model that raw data into images. Basically, I "scan" objects photographically and then assemble the different levels of sharpness. When I work with a digital camera, I only have one focal plane in the image per shot. In the digital process, I use these shots to create an image that is sharp from front to back. This stringing together of fragments is like modeling with raw data. These are actually concepts that come from sculpture. The sculptor takes away or adds material, and that's what I'm doing with the photographs. You might think my work is documentary photography, but it's not. I knead and grind, then model it to make a photographic sculpture.
Your pictures imitate landscapes. A pile of sand becomes a mountain range, a salt pile becomes a mighty glacier, a pile of asphalt becomes a panoramic table mountain. Is photography for you fiction rather than documentation?
Let's put it this way: fiction would be going too far, it's a game with reality. I don't invent these mountains, they exist. I need this mountain, for example Sandberg, on the basis of which I produce a digital Sandberg. Although it still has something to do with the original, it has undergone a process of transformation. The viewer has the feeling that what he or she sees is real, but it is not. The images look like photographs.
Collaging has some crucial advantages: If I shoot a mountain with just one photo, I have a center of the image, a central perspective center. With the collage process, I end up with a combination of hundreds of central-perspective fragments. This creates a sense of the center of the image at every point in the image. This technique was used in Renaissance painting. It is a combination of sculpture and photography and an attempt to create plasticity on a two-dimensional plane. What is fascinating about the works shown here at Kunsthalle Krems is that they look like sculptures that are totally present, they seem hyperreal and sublime.
Mountains of scrap bear witness to dirt and waste. Scrap metal, punched, pressed, crushed, is dumped on a grand scale. However, your pictures of the “Kremser Berge” – i.e. the accumulations of these raw, separated materials - are highly aesthetic.Do you see your art as a transformation of reality into something artificial?
At least it is the end product, but it is never my intention. The raw materials, whatever they are, interest me from a sculptor's point of view. I work with material. What I have in front of me is material. I transform this material on a photographic level. Not with the idea of making something beautiful out of it, but to show the object in all its details, to make the material readable. I look at my mountains and find references to our civilization in the details. The Großer Schrottberg in the exhibition contains everything from a drying rack to a car, a bicycle and a train. What madness: we'll all end up in a pile like that one day, it's the end of utility. Our whole life is in it. These piles are evidence of our lives, everything we throw away ends up in a pile like this.
Claude Monet painted serial haystacks in different light moods. You always work in series, too, but with piles of scrap instead of haystacks. Do you see a connection?
I love that comparison. Monet probably had a similar problem. He wanted to capture different moods of light. In order to get this impression as close to reality as possible, and to get the light right, he had to hurry. In my case, light is now a welcome distraction. I need several hours to photograph a subject. During that time, of course, the light conditions change. With my Großer Ringeberg, for example, you can see that the mountain is dark on the right and light on the left. You can see light where there shouldn't be any. This is due to the different lighting moods. Observant viewers sometimes notice that something is wrong, or that it can't be real.
You spent two months in Krems in 2022 as part of AIR - ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Lower Austria. There you found your “Kremser Berge” in the industrial area of the port. Was that a coincidence?
No, it was a very hard calculation. I was looking for a place where there was a port. There aren't many places where I would have had such opportunities, Krems was just perfect, it was supposed to be my place.