On May 2, 2009 the Sonnabend Gallery will open an exhibition of new works by Beate Gütschow.

In her ongoing series of large scale black and white photographic prints, Gütschow uses digital montage to construct cityscapes of decaying monolithic architecture that seems to exist in a post-apocalyptic alternate present. She builds these images out of hundreds of individual analog photographs she takes in locations all over the world.

At first glance, these images seem to be documentary photos of Brutalist concrete architecture, but the accumulation of details reveal that this is an impossible world where familiar but strangely recontextualized buildings stand in an overbuilt expanse of derelict concrete, tract housing developments, gigantic exhaust vents and deserted car parks. The totalitarian scale of the buildings overwhelms the tiny human figures, who stand in dazed groups or wander among the wreckage of burned cars.

Martin Engler has described these works as: “fascinatingly mute and non-localizable sceneries oscillating between wasteland and destruction. The sites are caught within a weightless void which conveys both final end and new beginning; vanquished metropolises combining the optimistic euphoria of a gigantic construction site with the traumatic stillness of a city in ruins.”