Gero Gries - Pictures, Art, Photography

Gero Gries

Background Information about Gero Gries

Introduction

Tracing the Essential

Gero Gries has dedicated himself completely to artistic creation on the computer. His precisely executed large-format interiors and portraits are highly stylized for purposes of idealized exaggeration. His computer-generated images show, among other things, interior spaces and thus continue the artistic genre of the interior. His pictures are based on the combination of his own experience or events and reflect his creative effort to trace the essential.

Gero Gries carefully and meticulously thinks over every detail down to the individual pixel, but as he says himself, prepares the images just as carelessly. Gero Gries is one of those artists who considers computer-supported image production a continuation of painting, via another medium. His pictures suppose photorealism, but would be unattainable using conventional tools of photography. He creates his pictures himself (using the design possibilities of constantly changing computer technology), so they are actually more closely related to painting than photography. This is also a peculiarity of his way of working, something that becomes all the more evident through his choice of subjects, which broadly conform to traditional genres of art.

By taking up and, in part, adopting art historical genres and motifs, Gero Gries follows in a long tradition of artists through all periods who reflect the work of predecessors thematically and in motif. Like Vermeer, for example, sunlight streaming in breaks through the oppressive mood of a closed room. Gero Gries chooses a similar arrangement to express this effect with painterly accuracy, but in his own style of formed, smooth, but no less emotional transmission, characterized by a hyperrealistic depiction of surfaces and precise illumination.

For the representation of different surface textures Gero Gries applies the technical possibilities of his software thereby achieving images of a clarity that would be unattainable with analogue photography even with the most sophisticated installations. Herein lies the aesthetic uniqueness of Gero Gries’ work.

Text: Ulrike Pennewitz
Source: www.portalkunstgeschichte.de

Bio

1951Born in Marburg
PhD in medicine
Since 1984Performances and exhibits
Since 1992Computer renderings
Lives and works in Berlin

Awards

1993-1994Studio Scholarship, Kunstwerke, Berlin
1991/1992DAAD Scholarship in Los Angeles
Guest lecturer at ArtCenter, Pasadena
1989/1990Studio Scholarship Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin

Exhibitions

2005Tunnelblick, DAM, Berlin
2000pict, Kunstiftung Poll, Berlin
1995/1996Meere & Zellen (Seas and Cells), various locations, Berlin
1994Adhan, Kunst vor Ort (Art on Location), Hannover-Langenhagen
1992v, Gallery Fenster, Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main
1990Mond 2 die 1. (Moon 2 1), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
zeitmalzeit (Time Meal), Laden für Nichts, Berlin
1989Bilder Lernen Fahren (Images Learn to Drive), Mehrzweckhalle, Berlin
1988Kunst für Touristen (Art for Tourists), Laden für Nichts, Berlin
2006FORESIGHT, Kunstverein Augsburg
2004Virtual Illusion, DAM, Berlin
2003Digital Power, DAM, Berlin
2002natürlich künstlich - Das virtuelle Bild (Naturally Artifical - the Virtual Image), Kunsthalle Rostock, Kunstverein Mannheim, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin
1999Digital Sunshine, Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark
1998Le futur du passé, LAC, Sigean, France
1996Exhibition: Die Gallery (Wewerka), Interims-Kunsthalle, Berlin
1993Integrale, NGBK, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin
Melancholische Tröstung & Zynismus (Melancholic Solace & Cynicism), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
Ruth Bloom Gallery, Los Angeles
Scholarship exhibition, Kunstwerke, Berlin
1992i.V., Gallery 4, Berlin
1991/1992Berlin Art Scene, Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo among others
1991Interferenzen (Interferences), Nationalmuseum, Riga
19901, 2, 3, Wewerka & Weiss Gallery, Berlin
Ceterum censeo, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
1989D&S, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg