Wrapped City
All images courtesy of www.deidivonschaewen.com.
Until 26th January, Kunsthalle Bratislava is hosting a solo exhibition of the work of French-German artist Deidi von Schaewen, focusing on her architectural photography, including a site specific series of photo collages called Wrapped City. Wrapped City concerns Von Schaewen’s examination of urban space, in which she searches for fragments, crumbled walls, faded coatings and coverings. She discovers and captures massive scaffolding and sheeting that becomes sculptural and suggests multiple planes of reality.
Kunsthalle Gallery says, “Not only is she pursuing impersonal architectural photography, she also uncovers the poetics of everyday objects and captures the variability of contemporary urban life in her work. She is looking for meanings in the unnoticed urban scenes and spaces, environment of peripheral societal layers, and in the coherent series uncovering the attractiveness of improvised solutions.”
Von Schaewen (born 1941) graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, but eventually decided to pursue photography. In one of her first shots she captured an advertisement on a wall and noticed that the old wall was obscured by scaffolding. This is where her passion to "restore" building walls was born. Aged 24, she left Berlin for Barcelona where her work became influenced by contact with the representatives of the early avant-garde and she began to photograph buildings hidden by scaffolding and sheets, inspired by the view of the large department store El Corte Inglés on Plaza Catalunya in Barcelona, covered by monumental tarpaulins.
In Selvedge Issue 66 India, we featured Von Schaewen’s project, Sacred Trees of India, to investigate the relationship between trees and humans as one of respect and spirituality. Von Schaewen believes that the sentience of trees gives them a higher power that is all too overlooked by European cultures.
For more information visit www.kunsthallebratislava.sk
