About Statement Essay
Thinking architecturally rather than photographically, Gabriele Viertel explores perception, atmosphere and materiality through images and spatial interventions.
Rather than documenting the visible world, her work investigates moments in which representation begins to dissolve into ambiguity, revealing subtle tensions between presence and absence, structure and atmosphere. Familiar points of orientation, including scale and spatial reference, are often withheld, allowing perception to unfold as an open and unstable process.
Initially trained in engineering, Viertel developed an early sensitivity to construction, material behaviour and spatial logic. Subsequent professional experiences within visual culture sharpened her awareness of perception and the ways images shape our understanding of reality.
An earlier body of work, centred on photographing human figures underwater, explored the transformation of perception through distortion, suspension and altered states of visibility. While this series forms a completed chapter within her oeuvre, it established many of the questions that continue to inform her practice today.
Whether working with photography or space, Viertel is interested in situations in which perception becomes aware of itself. Her practice often moves between architectural precision and sensory uncertainty, where scale, orientation and material presence remain fluid.
Space before decoration. Light before furnishing. Perception before style.
Working through acts of observation, reduction and transformation, she creates images and spatial situations that invite viewers to encounter the world not as a fixed reality, but as an ongoing perceptual experience.
Statement
For decades, images have become increasingly fast.
They are consumed within seconds, absorbed through recognition, categorised and forgotten. Their value often lies in what they depict rather than in how they are experienced.
My work begins with a resistance to this condition.
Although I work with photography, I am not interested in the image as a carrier of information. I am interested in perception itself.
The photographs are not intended to describe a place, document an event or communicate a narrative. Instead, they explore the threshold at which an image ceases to function as representation and begins to operate as an experience.
Landscape serves as a starting point, but not as a subject. Horizon lines, water surfaces, light and atmosphere become material rather than motif. Through reduction, familiar visual references are gradually removed, allowing attention to shift from recognition to perception.
This approach emerged from a conscious departure from my earlier work. For many years, I photographed anonymous human figures underwater. While that body of work centred on physical presence, the current work is concerned with the conditions that make presence possible in the first place.
The question is no longer what we see.
The question is how seeing occurs.
My background outside the traditional art world has shaped this approach. Having worked in engineering before entering the field of visual art, I remain interested in structures, systems and the organisation of experience. This influence appears less in the imagery itself than in the way the work is constructed: through reduction, precision and an architectural understanding of space.
I often think of the images not as pictures but as environments.
They are intended to be entered rather than read.
In this sense, the work occupies a territory between photography, architecture and contemporary art. It is less concerned with producing images than with creating situations in which perception becomes visible to itself.
At a moment when visual culture increasingly rewards speed, certainty and instant interpretation, I am interested in ambiguity, duration and attentiveness.
Not because they provide answers.
But because they create the possibility of a different kind of encounter.
Perhaps the most important question for me is whether an image can become a place of experience rather than an object of observation.
In both my images and spatial interventions, I am drawn to moments when perception becomes aware of itself.
Rather than working through subjects or stories, I explore situations in which the act of seeing loses its familiarity, allowing the world to be encountered anew — in the image as much as in space.
Everything in my work begins there.
Essay
BEFORE INTERPRETATION
On the Work of Gabriele Viertel
The photographs of Gabriele Viertel begin with the visible world, but they do not primarily describe it. Horizons, surfaces, architectural openings, shadows and planes are reduced until their identity becomes secondary to the spatial relations they produce.
A horizon becomes division.
An opening becomes transition.
Water becomes surface.
Light becomes structure.
This process of reduction does not move the photograph away from reality. Rather, it isolates structures that are already present within perception itself.
Viertel’s images often appear immediately legible. Their elements are familiar, their compositions precise, their visual language restrained. Yet this apparent clarity is deceptive. The longer one looks, the less stable certain spatial relationships become. Scale may remain uncertain. Depth can collapse into surface. Reflections disturb the distinction between what is present and what is projected. Architectural elements may retain their geometry while losing their function.
The result is not abstraction in the conventional sense. The world remains present, but its usual hierarchy of information has been suspended.
This suspension is central to Viertel’s work.
Her photographs establish an interval between seeing something and determining what it is. Within that interval, perception becomes active. The viewer is required to negotiate relationships of distance, direction, surface, depth and light rather than simply identify a subject.
There is a distinctly architectural intelligence at work here. Architecture, however, appears less as subject matter than as a way of thinking. Space is understood relationally: through vertical and horizontal forces, enclosure and opening, proximity and distance, surface and depth.
The photograph becomes a spatial construction.
This concern with perception rather than representation connects Viertel’s work to a broader trajectory within post-war art. Minimalism shifted attention from the autonomous image toward the viewer’s physical and spatial encounter with the work, while artists associated with Light and Space, notably Robert Irwin and James Turrell, made light, spatial orientation and perceptual instability into artistic material in their own right. In their work, perception is not simply the means by which an artwork is apprehended; it becomes part of the work’s subject.
Viertel’s position touches this history while operating through a fundamentally different condition. The viewer does not physically enter an installation or encounter an altered architectural environment. The perceptual event is compressed into the two-dimensional photographic plane. Actual space is transformed into an image that continues to behave spatially. Photography thus becomes the site of a productive contradiction: it is materially flat while capable of generating depth, orientation and spatial uncertainty. Viertel works precisely within this tension between surface and space.
This is particularly evident across Viertel’s different bodies of work, which can be understood less as separate series than as variations within a larger perceptual investigation.
In Vertical State, verticality is detached from its descriptive function. Lines and divisions may originate in the physical environment, but their source is less important than the directional force they establish within the image. The vertical is no longer simply an attribute of something represented; it becomes an event in itself.
Horizontal State approaches spatial organisation differently. Here the horizon functions as one of the most elementary structures through which vision establishes orientation. It separates and connects simultaneously: above and below, near and distant, material and atmosphere.
Viertel retains this basic ordering principle while reducing many of the elements through which landscape normally becomes identifiable. Sand, water and sky can approach fields of tone rather than conventional landscape components. The horizon continues to organise the image, but the narrative of place recedes.
These works are therefore landscapes only in a limited sense. Their deeper subject is the act of orientation itself.
With Surface State, that orientation becomes less secure.
Water is particularly significant because it resists a stable spatial reading. It can simultaneously appear as surface and depth, matter and reflection, transparency and obstruction. Viertel isolates precisely this instability.
The eye may recognise water while remaining uncertain about the space it occupies. Knowing what something is does not necessarily resolve how it appears.
In Spatial Perception, architecture provides the most explicit framework for this investigation. Openings, passages, walls, illuminated planes and thresholds recur, but they are removed from the conventions of architectural documentation. Buildings are not presented primarily as designed objects or identifiable places. Their elements become instruments through which space can be divided, framed, obscured or extended.
An aperture establishes one space within another. A passage produces direction. A wall interrupts continuity. Light can flatten volume or reveal it.
The threshold has particular significance because it occupies an ambiguous spatial condition. It separates one realm from another while belonging fully to neither. Viertel repeatedly returns to this condition of being between.
The resulting images may leave fundamental spatial questions unresolved: where exactly is the picture located? What lies in front of what? Does an illuminated field describe an opening, a surface or a projection? Is the eye looking at a plane or through it?
Such uncertainty is never theatrical. Viertel does not construct visual riddles. The ambiguity is quieter and more structural. It arises because information that would normally stabilise the image has been withheld.
And this withholding has a temporal consequence.
Reduction creates time.
When contextual information is diminished, recognition slows. Elements that might otherwise appear incidental begin to carry greater perceptual weight: the edge of a plane, a shift in luminosity, the density of a shadow, the interruption of a line.
Reduction, in this sense, is not an aesthetic of absence. It is a method of concentration.
This is also where Viertel’s photographs move between representation and abstraction without settling completely within either.
Their forms are not invented independently of the world. They are found within it.
A horizon already transforms continuous space into a division. A shadow translates volume into plane. A reflection separates appearance from physical location. An architectural opening places one visual field inside another.
Viertel’s intervention consists in recognising these latent structures and isolating them photographically.
Photography has repeatedly tested the boundary between description and abstraction. From the radical viewpoints and fragmentations of the New Vision in the 1920s to later photographic practices that treated architecture, landscape and the everyday environment as systems of signs and spatial relations, the camera has demonstrated that the visible world can be reorganised without ceasing to be photographic.
Viertel’s work belongs to this problem of photographic seeing, but its emphasis is distinct. The fragment is not used primarily to produce formal dynamism, nor is architecture approached as cultural document or typology. What is extracted from the visible world is a reduced set of perceptual relations. Abstraction therefore occurs not through the abandonment of the world, but through an intensified attention to its perceptual structures.
The camera performs an act of selection rather than accumulation. What matters is not how much of the world can be contained within the frame, but how little may be required for a spatial relationship to remain perceptually active.
This gives the different series their underlying coherence.
Verticality, horizontality, surface, depth, threshold and light are not separate subjects. They are conditions through which space becomes perceptible.
The recurrent use of the word State is therefore revealing. It suggests something provisional rather than categorical: a condition in which the visible world can temporarily exist before it is fixed by interpretation.
The viewer occupies an equally important position within this system. Viertel’s images rarely impose a single reading, but neither are they indeterminate. They establish precise visual conditions and leave the act of resolving them partially open.
Their restraint is therefore not passive.
It activates the space between image and observer.
The longer one looks, the more the photograph can move away from the certainty of its subject and toward the instability of one’s own seeing. What initially seemed obvious becomes conditional. Surface can become space; space can return to surface. An opening may simultaneously divide and connect. Light may describe an object or dissolve it.
What emerges is a practice concerned not so much with what the world looks like, but with the structures through which it becomes visible.
In Viertel’s work, reduction does not lead toward emptiness. It leads toward attention.
A line remains.
A surface holds light.
An opening interrupts space.
A horizon establishes distance.
The image does not need to resolve itself beyond this.
Its completion takes place in perception.