Andrej Pirrwitz
Photography

Opening: Wednesday, October 29th, 7 PM
Speech: Dr. Edith Almhofer, Curator and Publisher
Exhibition: October 30th to November 29th 2014

At Galerie Hrobsky Annex (Grünangergasse 8, 1010 Wien, directly next to the main gallery space) photographer Andrej Pirrwitz (*1963 in Dresden, lives and works in Strassbourg and Berlin) will present current work as part of eyes on – month of photography 2014.

Pirrwitz works with a 4x5 inch large-format-camera and sees himself as a director of time-space. His practice is a quest for traces. Light, space, colour, form and movement combine to form a new, independent pictorial reality with surreal components. The artist uses natural light exclusively and uses time exposure to express the passage of time. Sparse interior spaces function as sets for manifesting figures, resembling apparitions, the obliterations sometimes only being very subtle, sometimes being explicit. Andrej Pirrwitz thereby manages to capture subtle traces in their fleetingness and transience.

The process of fading leads Pirrwitz to create melancholy, poetic images with a gripping intensity and not without a trace of irony, either. Recalling Bachelard’s term “topophilia”, the photographer presents his work under the title “tempophile etudes”. Not the theme, the place or the moment of his recordings, but the passage of time itself is the focus of Andrej Pirrwitz’s practice. Through their being in space and their movement through time, the acting figures create the space surrounding them, through their movements, they create the colourful traces within it, that manifest in the product, a “condensed space-time”, the photograph.

To not only design the two-dimensional pictorial space and its colourful structure through the choice of image section, Andrej Pirrwitz colours, moves and changes items or sections of the real space during the image recording process, but leaves the final photograph unedited.