Welcome Fine art photography | 20th and 21st century | Gerald Zugmann | Vienna
Photographs are skins, pelliculae, simulacra, removed from the things that surround us or are even concealed from view. The earliest photographs were as thin and fine in their material structure as the sheets of paper that received them – photogenic drawings, morphologies, exposed once in the contact and then removed from the light again between the pages of books.
Photographs are leaves, life pages of a book, delicate, grassy, transparent pages of nature and manifest pages of built objects, the architecture of our world. Photographs, once removed from direct contact with the world by the camera and the lens, bring the world closer while moving it further away.
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Gerald Zugmann has been experimenting for 40 years with proximity and distance and the photographically broken relationship the two maintain, as if to offload proximity and create distance. His photographs of architecture, his light openings, his broad horizons and his built counterparts, dark and opaque, imbue his work with rhythm, as do his Californian or Irish landscapes, the masks or the construed natures.
Famous buildings and anonymous nature, countries and places, Gerald Zugmann is present everywhere with his images, searching. Gerald Zugmann has been taking photographs all over the world for four decades. He visits landscapes and urban centres and furnishes architecture with an alphabet through his camera. He finds, even invents, bodies in perspectives, seeks shadows which he breaks into light, intuitions.
Each one of his photographs also touches on the fundamentals of architecture, the descent, the gradient. And as buildings are amalgamations of physical dwelling and light abstraction, so Gerald Zugmann brings together morphologies of the built and the grown, formulating analogies. His photographic statements are also lent rhythm by other works, by grasses, masks, carcasses, tinted leaves and flowers, from which a no less original morphology can be read, sometimes even more so than from the buildings of well-known architects.
These works cannot be separated from one another; their conflation reveals Gerald Zugmann’s cautious search for proximity and distance, and his approach to both in the material faktura of this world.
Hubertus v. Amelunxen, 2012
[ fla'nør ] | limited art book | fine art photography 2017
Inspired by philosophers and thinkers, the new and limited art book entitled [ fla'nør ] collects 172 photographs. Like a flaneur Gerald Zugmann strolls through his Œuvre, extracts content, removes dusted ballast and reassembles to gather fresh levels of meaning.
The book is a compilation of nine single cahiers, that convey a shared message like a literary work. The observer is accompanied into a coherent world of – literally – new perspectives and automatically builds up own ways to communicate with the pictures.
![Gerald Zugmann [fla’nø:r] Luxury edition of 8 copies in an individual slipcase No. I - VIII including 2 numbered and signed Gelatin Silver Print "Maske VIII" & "Notes of Grass 2/VII" and a numbered and signed Fine Art Print "Structures XI/1, XI/2, XI/3"](https://www.zugmann.at/upload/cache/phpThumb_cache_zugmann.at_src90578183968a5fccd0ee49eaf770ebc3_par50cbe698e714f10c143f24e20a857228_dat1500045448.jpeg)
