Influenced by the Düsseldorf School of the late 1970s, whose sober, unembellished and documentary approach captivated viewers through its exactitude, serialization and diversified typologies of anonymous artifacts, Petra Wunderlich cultivates a subjective element that is paradoxically expressed through a detached pictorial concept: with their lucid, restrained, unambiguous visual language of minimalism and objectivity, her photographs of Zuoz house facades illustrate that we will never be allowed a glimpse of the most intimate stories that lie behind them.
Captured by a large-format camera, these facades of Zuoz, as frozen moments in time, reflect this barrier to knowledge in a bivalent — in other words, sensitive yet detached—manner. They visually translate the fragmentary nature of our epistemological “thrownness” through the use of occasionally severly cropped image compositions. The fire of Zuoz in 1499, which was set for defensive reasons, might serve as a reminder that even what is objective slips into irretrievability by virtue of its ephemerality. In contrast, the gelatin silver prints made by the artist demonstrate the preservation of a point in time.
