press
»Verena Guther visually approaches the essence of a city on several levels and, in her clearly composed photo montages, presents the cities in their changeability, as a changing and moving structure. Her photomontages, in which photography and painting enter into a symbiosis through their unique creative process, show a highly sensitive play with structures, perspectives and color atmospheres that invites the viewer to look at a supposedly well-known metropolis from a completely new perspective.
This balanced game with reality, deception and illusion contrasts the emptiness and anonymity of the big city with a semantic and sensual abundance.«
»Verena Guther has been drawn to the world’s metropolises for years as part of concentrated periods of work, on the hunt for uniqueness. Pursuing her conceptual idea, she notes and documents elements using her camera from a variety of different perspectives which comes to pass from upheaval and departure, architectural statics and movement in the urban space. These notations form the basis of Guther’s large-sized photomontages and haptic picture collages. Their unique quality is unveiled by grouping analogue structural motifs and color emphases into exciting webs of images. The view with which the Darmstadt artist layers the city’s rhythmic composition is also highly poetic; she is inspired by a city image’s graphical manner as well as by the interweaving of different colors.«
»The work of Verena Guther leads the viewer on voyages of discovery through space and time, into vanished worlds, worlds which are disappearing and into the worlds of the future. With a lively feel for shifts in reality, and a clear view of the places where the furor of these disappearances makes us hold our breath for a second, Guther exposes the ossified tissue of cities, the parts that are hidden from everyday view. For a second it seems we have a glimpse through a crack in the door, as in the narrow strip-like image New York I, which depicts the scene of a mysterious crime, where generations of people and decades of aging objects have left their mark. These traces gave the neighbourhoods of Chelsea their unmistakeable patina before these special touches were discovered to have marketing potential and were exploited by the real estate industry in its rage for gentrification, leading to one wave after another of people on the move.«