Ingar Krauss: Fragile

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to present Ingar Krauss: Fragile, the gallery’s first solo exhibition for the artist, on view online from Tuesday 12 May through Saturday 30 May. Please direct all inquiries to info@nailyaalexandergallery.com.

Born in East Berlin in 1965, Ingar Krauss worked as a psychiatric caregiver before turning to photography in the mid-1990s. From the start, Krauss was drawn to portraiture. His subjects have included his daughter and her friends in the Oderbruch countryside in eastern Germany; children living in state-run orphanages and juvenile prisons in the former Soviet Union; and the Eastern European migrant workers who travel hundreds of miles to Germany every year for seasonal fruit and vegetable harvests. In the introduction to Krauss’s first book, Portraits (Hatje Cantz, 2006), Vince Aletti writes that Krauss “has produced a remarkable group of images that balance historical resonance with contemporary relevance…The portraits are understated, unsentimental, and as straightforward as official documents, but they also have an extraordinary emotional weight and clarity.”

In 2010, Krauss began working on a series of still lifes – embarking, in effect, on a new form of portraiture, one in which his subjects were not human faces and personalities but the flora and fauna of the natural world. Krauss carefully arranges his pears, quinces, lilacs, and taxidermied animals in stage-like boxes of his own construction, then shoots the composition under natural light and creates a gelatin-silver print to which he applies a delicate glaze of oil paint. Some subjects are suspended from a string at the top of the box, while others are positioned in the foreground against a deep, darkening depth of field, echoing the work of the dramatic Baroque Spanish still-life painter Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627) and placing the natural world, both literally and metaphorically, on a pedestal.