Hive

Modern societies create buildings. Do buildings generate communities? Do buildings help to construct identities or do they determine a particular and narrow pathway despite their open spaces? Hive is a series of photographic works shot throughout RMIT's New Academic Street, a large area of the University that is currently undergoing a major reconstruction and transformation. The reconstructed contemporary education buildings are designed to provide spaces that are felt as common ground and spaces for knowledge sharing. They are meeting and learning environments for students.  Through her images, Grützner asks whether architecture can have a directed performative power, and to what extent that power can determine human behaviour. To Grützner, these spaces are a metaphor for the process of orientation, way-finding and also alienation. Artifical interiors draw links to retro computer games that require the player to advance from level to level. Other spaces within the buildings feel alive with the potential to enclose those within them, and some feel like spatialised comic-strip pictures blown out to three-dimensions. For Grützner, these buildings and their interior spaces also connect with the architecture that exists in natural structures such as the bee hive. Through subtle manipulations of her analogue photographs, Grützner highlights her responses to physical space through bold design, colour and form, whilst also revealing the uncanny that exists within these spaces.

Andrea Grützner (born 1984, Pirna, Germany) is a Berlin and Konstanz based artist and photographer. Andrea's medium is photography, but her pictures seem to shift between different media, such as photography, painting and collage. Her interests involve the perception of space, historic and memorial structures, visual irritation, the familiar and at the same time unfamiliar. Andrea Grützner was awarded her Master of Arts degree in photography by the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences in 2014. After graduation she received both the 'PhotoVision Sponsorship Award' and the 'Source Cord Prize' in 2014, as well as the 'LEAD Award' (silver) in 2015 and was a winner of 'Gute aussichten – junge deutsche fotografie prize' in 2014/2015 and FOAM Talent 2016. She is the jury winner of this year ING Unseen Talent with her work Hive. Andrea published the photo book das Eck (Kerber Verlag in March 2016), which was developed during the course of her grant Koblenzer Stadtfotografin 2015. She is represented by Julie Saul Gallery, New York and Robert Morat Gallery, Berlin.