Gabriele Viertel is a visual and spatial artist living and working in Portugal, whose work investigates perception as a spatial and temporal condition.
Trained in engineering and shaped by a long engagement with visual culture, Viertel initially approached structure and spatial relationships from a technical perspective, while her orientation was already fundamentally visual and creative. Only later did she recognise architecture as the field in which these interests might have converged most directly. In retrospect, this technical background appears less as a departure from her artistic practice than as an early foundation for her continuing engagement with space, perception.and the conditions of seeing.
Her earlier work centred on the human figure underwater, exploring weightlessness, transformation and the instability of the body. Over time, the figure disappeared and space itself became the subject of investigation.
Her current work examines the threshold between recognition and perception. Through reduction and the withholding of familiar spatial references, her images create situations in which representation becomes uncertain while spatial perception persists.
Gabriele Viertel’s work has been exhibited and published internationally and is held in public and private collections in Europe and the United States. Her publications are held by institutional libraries including Princeton University Library and Harvard University Fine Arts Library. She serves on the judging panel for the Graphis Photography Awards 2027, New York, and previously received Platinum and Silver Awards in the Graphis Photography Annual 2016.
ARTISTIC POSITION
- Statement
My work begins with perception rather than representation.
I have always had a strong need for visual and sensory quiet. Not for emptiness, symmetry or the absence of tension, but for a state in which nothing unnecessarily demands attention. I am drawn to reduction as a way of creating this condition — allowing tension to remain without becoming visual noise. This has led to a recurring question in my work: how little information is needed for something still to be perceived?
Working exclusively with an iPhone, I investigate this question through physically existing situations. Its immediacy keeps seeing and recording closely connected. Reduction occurs at the moment of observation, through viewpoint, framing, light and isolation rather than subsequent digital manipulation.
Across different bodies of work, scale, orientation, surface and depth may become uncertain. Familiar references recede, yet spatial relationships persist. A line, an edge, a tonal shift or a change in light can be enough for space to emerge.
What interests me is this threshold: the point at which information is reduced but perception does not disappear. The photographs are not intended primarily to describe what is visible, but to make the process of perceiving it perceptible.
-Approach
Reduction is not emptiness. It is concentration.
Reduction, for me, is not primarily an aesthetic choice, but a way of thinking. I am drawn to precision: in images, in space, in language, and in communication. What can be removed without diminishing what matters?
This does not mean simplifying complexity. On the contrary, complexity can remain fully present while the information through which it is communicated is reduced.
This principle underlies my artistic practice. I do not seek to make an image simpler, but to concentrate its conditions. As visual information is reduced, relationships between light, surface, edge, direction and space become more active. Recognition may be delayed, while perception continues.
Reduction therefore creates an interval: a space between seeing and knowing, between information and interpretation.
What interests me is not less for its own sake, but the point at which less information can produce greater concentration.
DOCUMENTS
CV Gabriele Viertel
From Image to Perception
As far as I can see, I see — english
As far as I can see, I see — deutsch