Sites - Friederike von Rauch

Hafnarborg, the Hafnarfjörður Centre for Culture and Fine Arts, presents an exhibition of works by the German photographer Friederike von Rauch (b. 1967), who has garnered attention for her limpid, tranquil photographs of familiar and unfamiliar locales. Through her pictures, Rauch seeks to present unusual viewpoints on desolate and deserted places. She experiments with erasing the history and symbolic meaning of her sites, to render them as dream-like and timeless images. With extraordinary sensitivity, she coaxes the inner life from her subject material, using photographic technique and the natural illumination of each locale. This exhibition features some photographs that Friederike von Rauch took in Iceland during her stay at Bær, the artists’ residency in Skagafjörður. Rauch’s vision of the Icelandic countryside and environment is unique, and a noteworthy addition to the current discussion on Iceland’s environmental issues. This exhibition enjoys the sponsorship of the Goethe Institute and is a part of the Reykjavik Art Festival 2010.

Friederike von Rauch holds a degree in industrial design and is a silversmith. Her interest for the medium of photography started as she worked as a locationscout for the film industry. Her works have been presented in private and group exhibitions, most recently in Martin- Gropius-Bau in Berlin. Von Rauch’s photographs have been presented in catalogues and books, amongst them the award winning publication about Neues Museum in Berlin and the architect David Chipperfield.

About the artist:
Friederike von Rauch is one of those artists, whose work immediately grips the beholder, astounding us with the clarity of her compositions and the total restraint of the elements used. The simplicity her pictures exude is the result of precise preparation and meticulous reflection on her approach. Von Rauch uses only real places as her motifs, and has long focused on architecture-related landscapes as a rich source of inspiration. Her methodology is shaped by the incredible precision of her technique and execution, and her utterly reduced pool of image elements. This extreme limitation is one of the main reasons her pictures have such a strong impact. The consistent and stringent exclusion of human figures creates a special sense of mystery. Her pictures build an impression of dreamy emptiness and timelessness. The artist leaves out everything superficially dramatic, expressive, narrative. Her pictures achieve their distinctive sense of tension because the beholder is not given any context or information, and is forced to fall back on the scant information provided. Surfaces, tersely sketched hints at physical connections, materials, minimal traces. Although the finished photos are the highly concentrated and dense product of a long process of searching, reduction and selection, they are not picture puzzles that can be solved once you discover the place and context. The identification of the places and buildings depicted is of no consequence for the deeper understanding of her pictures. What really counts are the visual focuses and the atmospheres she captures in these places. Friederike von Rauch’s photographs have a highly distinctive personal language which almost always includes, along with her choice of location and the specific way she approaches her motifs, her use of diffuse daylight.  This scattered, misty light allows her to attain practically shadow less light moods which make all physical and architectural bodies appear softer. As well as the special light, colours have been reduced to a bare minimum. Her pictures stand for photographic minimalism that is characterised by its extreme reduction of pictorial stimuli and the virtual exclusion of all illustrative references. The compositional coherence of these photos means that each can stand on its own, and yet together they create a context that tells us more about the spaces and places of our reality, facets that we might not ordinarily perceive. Friederike von Rauch’s photos reflect her personally formulated vision of the places she has found and at the same time they shape our perception of reality by getting us to see our surroundings with her visual language.

Dr. Andres Lepik, MoMA The Museum of Modern Art