Statement
My work begins with perception rather than representation.
Working through photography, I investigate how space is constructed through seeing — and how little visual information is necessary for spatial experience to persist. Scale, orientation and depth are reduced or withheld, allowing familiar representation to become uncertain without dissolving entirely into abstraction.
I am interested in this threshold: the moment when recognition no longer provides certainty, yet perception continues.
My background in engineering informs the way I think about space — through structure, proportion and spatial relationships. Photography becomes a means of constructing perceptual situations rather than describing the visible world.
I often think of the images not as pictures but as environments. They are intended to be entered rather than read.
The question is no longer what we see.
The question is how seeing occurs.
CV — Exhibitions, Collections & Publications
About
Gabriele Viertel is a visual and spatial artist whose work investigates perception as a spatial and temporal condition.
Her practice is rooted in an architectural way of thinking. Trained in engineering and shaped by a long engagement with visual culture, she approaches photography not primarily as a means of representation, but as a way of constructing spatial experience.
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, shifts in orientation and the withholding of familiar spatial references, her images create situations in which representation becomes uncertain while spatial perception persists.
Gabriele Viertel serves on the judging panel for the Graphis Photography Awards 2027, New York. She previously received Platinum and Silver Awards in the Graphis Photography Annual 2016.
