In August 2005, Switzerland experiences a number of violent thunderstorms that occasion the sudden rise in rivers and streams, flooding and mud slides. During these exceptional weather conditions Annelies Strba finds herself in the Graubünden preparing an exhibition. Standing in the middle of this landscape, she is soon the fortunate witness to an apocalyptic atmosphere. With the sky on the point of bursting, she takes out her digital camera and captures startling views of a nature that has broken all its bounds.
Freezing the low-angled light as it starkly outlines the mountain ridge and thus sharpens relief and lends a dramatic cast to the shadows, the artist makes the series Mountains something that is quite unlike the rest of her output. For one, there is no human presence (whereas the artist would never mount a show without featuring some human figures), and the hyperrealist look of the shots, moreover, is not in fact the result of some digital reworking. This group of six photographs is her response to an invitation extended by the gallery owner Anton Meier to publish a mountain series by Strba.
After several years devoted to video art, she reconnects here with photography. Printed on matte paper using an ink-jet printer, the images, which run to the edge of the support, create an optimal immersion for the eye. The sky often takes pride of place in the composition as if to emphasise the threat of the imminent cloudburst. The timelessness of the mass of mountains is brought together with the rhythm of a lively, shifting, fleeting sky in a dreamlike world similar to the one the artist has been developing in her photography as a whole.
Freezing the low-angled light as it starkly outlines the mountain ridge and thus sharpens relief and lends a dramatic cast to the shadows, the artist makes the series Mountains something that is quite unlike the rest of her output. For one, there is no human presence (whereas the artist would never mount a show without featuring some human figures), and the hyperrealist look of the shots, moreover, is not in fact the result of some digital reworking. This group of six photographs is her response to an invitation extended by the gallery owner Anton Meier to publish a mountain series by Strba.
After several years devoted to video art, she reconnects here with photography. Printed on matte paper using an ink-jet printer, the images, which run to the edge of the support, create an optimal immersion for the eye. The sky often takes pride of place in the composition as if to emphasise the threat of the imminent cloudburst. The timelessness of the mass of mountains is brought together with the rhythm of a lively, shifting, fleeting sky in a dreamlike world similar to the one the artist has been developing in her photography as a whole.
