SWAY, HAMPSHIRE.- ArtSway and the Goethe-Institut, London are pleased to present two exhibitions featuring newly commissioned and existing work by German photographer Beate Gütschow. R/LS will mark the first British exhibition by Gütschow, who has previously exhibited widely in Europe and the USA.

Gütschow has developed the landscape photography of her previous LS series, in which she reconstructed landscape paintings of the 17th and 18th Century. Following the conventions of landscapes painted by Claude Lorrain, Thomas Gainsborough and Jacob van Ruisdael, Gütschow photographed individual elements of landscapes and people and recreated idyllic scenes using digital montage, creating a refreshed approach to the notion of utopia. As Gütschow explains: “Landscape (nature) never looked like this. In my work ideal means not to exclude the ugliness, it means to construct reality.” For her new work, created at ArtSway, she has extended this montage process to the media of video.

Gütschow’s new works are based upon canvases by Ruisdael - both entitled The Jewish Cemetery (1654, 1655), which are themselves assemblages of several idealised features, widely thought to convey an allegorical message. In response to these paintings Gütschow located the actual Jewish Cemetery (at Ouderkerk near Amsterdam) featured in Ruisdael’s original. She then sourced and filmed relevant settings in the New Forest, while she was ArtSway’s artist in residence in the Autumn of 2006, to recreate a close approximation of Ruisdael’s canvases. The results are eerie, melancholic video works that reference the original paintings via the unflinching gaze of the video camera lens.

Beate Gütschow was selected from a group of nominated artists for a residency at ArtSway in September and October 2006. During the residency ArtSway and the Goethe-Institut in London provided mentoring and practical support towards the development of two video works, R#1 and R#2, exhibited with a selection from the photography series LS, at ArtSway from 24 February - 8 April 2007. R#1 and R#2 will also be exhibited at the Goethe-Institut, London, from 15 February - 8 April 2007.

Beate Gütschow was born in Mainz, Germany in 1970 and now lives in Berlin. She studied at Hochschule fur bildende Kunste, Hamburg with Bernhard Johannes Blume and Wolfgang Tillmans, experimenting with painting and video as well as photography. She has recently exhibited in the Mutations I touring exhibition that tours seven different venues for the European Month of Photography, and was awarded the Ars Viva Prize in 2006.