Gero Gries

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

Solo Exhibitions

2005	Tunnelblick, DAM, Berlin
2000	pict, Kunstiftung Poll, Berlin
1995/1996	Meere & Zellen (Seas and Cells), various locations, Berlin
1994	Adhan, Kunst vor Ort (Art on Location), Hannover-Langenhagen
1992	v, Gallery Fenster, Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main
1990	Mond 2 die 1. (Moon 2 1), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
	zeitmalzeit (Time Meal), Laden für Nichts, Berlin
1989	Bilder Lernen Fahren (Images Learn to Drive), Mehrzweckhalle, Berlin
1988	Kunst für Touristen (Art for Tourists), Laden für Nichts, Berlin

Group Exhibitions

2006	FORESIGHT, Kunstverein Augsburg
2004	Virtual Illusion, DAM, Berlin
2003	Digital Power, DAM, Berlin
2002	natürlich künstlich - Das virtuelle Bild (Naturally Artifical - the Virtual Image), Kunsthalle Rostock, Kunstverein Mannheim, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin
1999	Digital Sunshine, Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark
1998	Le futur du passé, LAC, Sigean, France
1996	Exhibition: Die Gallery (Wewerka), Interims-Kunsthalle, Berlin
1993	Integrale, 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
1992	i.V., Gallery 4, Berlin
1991/1992	Berlin Art Scene, Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo among others
1991	Interferenzen (Interferences), Nationalmuseum, Riga
1990	1, 2, 3, Wewerka & Weiss Gallery, Berlin
	Ceterum censeo, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
1989	D&S, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg