CLAUDIA USES DISTURBANCES AS A KEY PRIORITY FOR HER COMPOSITIONS
CARMEN HUST | ARTICULATE #18 | JANUAR 2019 The motivation of German artist Claudia Grünig (1965), is to be found in many different driving forces. Creating images that she’s missing in any way to complete her subjective view of this world. The favorite medium of Claudia Grünig is photography. However, she’s originally a painter. Every imaginable combination of different elements is possible and to Grünig the invention of surrealist habitats in painting is not difficult. In contrast photos appear to show the reality.
Today Grünig is all the more interested in the possibility of situating surrealistic moments and dreamlike sequences in the reality of photography. In doing so she uses the original motifs for a content and compositional new beginning. Different approaches lead Claudia Grünig to her pictures. Following an intuition that arises from observing the world around her, allowing her to design a new image that seem logic to her. The visible image very often arises before the formulation, which could describe it linguistically. The finished picture reveals its content to Grünig, which she could only grasp intuitively before. Nevertheless, she almost stages all her cycles, always in close relation to her intuition. Only later, during the digital image processing and the combination of her original motives, Grünig finds her final image. It is created by omitting individual picture elements on the different superimposed layers.
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Claudia Grünig is certainly aware of the effect of the Golden Ratio, which she considers an ideal principle of aesthetic proportioning and finds its role model in nature. The arrangement and connection of formal elements, which find themselves in a good balance, certainly play an important role. However, a good composition transports necessarily the image content. Disturbances of equilibrium can also contribute to a good composition, but in a different way. It is a question of weighting. To Grünig personally, disturbances and irritations sometimes have a certain priority
The pictures that influences Grünig’s work comes from painting. The fascination that emanates from them and attracts her, is characterized by very different aspects; such as the light in the works of the painter Georges de la Tour. On the other hand, it is the unsparing representation of the personal condition in the paintings of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, touching her heart. To Grünig in the foreground stands her authentic imagery, in which her emotional world finds her own translation. Even so, fairy tales and legends are an inspiration to her, as they carry collective memories and truth in themselves.
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Last but not least, language is another source of inspiration to Grünig. Her series WONDERLAND is inspired by a literary text. This work currently includes about 40 photographs and is her most extensive photographic cycle. In the press release of the project Elke Peters wrote following:
The title is related to the stories of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice behind the mirrors" by the British writer Lewis Carroll. More than 150 years after their appearance, these stories and their overwhelming imagery have lost nothing of their fascination. The ingenious and opulent pictorial language of the original narratives inspired her to transform the language into actually visible images. Claudia Grünig transports her artistic statement through the medium of the "staged photography" on an emotional level through her metaphysical pictorial vocabulary. She manages to create the paradox "to invent photographs" with an ease that opens the way for the viewer to leave behind all previous viewing habits and conventions and to participate in their playful process. (Elke Peters, 2018)
This article about CLAUDIA GRÜNIG takes part of ARTICULATE #18. Read, download or order your print version of the full publication below
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