ArtistOsterburg, Lothar

Artist Years1961-living

Artist NationalityAmerican

TitleMiami Beach

Year1987

MediumDrawing > Mixed Media

DimensionsSheet: 23.5 X 21.5 inches

Accession NumberRC1696

Notessterburg was born in Braunschweig, West Germany, in 1961. In his youth, he trained as a musician, playing double bass and piano, but turned to art at Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig, earning a degree in printmaking and experimental filmmaking. After participating in a university exchange program in San Francisco, he immigrated to the United States in 1987 and worked as a printer at the de Soto Workshop (San Francisco) and Graphicstudio (Tampa) and as master printer at Crown Point Press in San Francisco, where he learned the process of photogravure on a project for artist Christian Boltanski.

Osterburg is now a New York-based artist and master printer in intaglio, who works in sculpture, photography, printmaking and video. He is best known for photogravures featuring rough small-scale models of rustic structures, water and air vessels, and imaginary cities, staged in evocative settings and photographed to appear life-size to disorienting, mysterious or whimsical effect. New York Times critic Grace Glueck writes that Osterburg's rich-toned, retro prints "conjur[e] up monumental phenomena by minimal means"; Judy Pfaff describes his work as thick with film noir–like atmosphere, warmth, reverie, drama and timelessness.

Osterburg has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and New York Foundation for the Arts, and his work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress and Art Institute of Chicago, among others. He has exhibited at the International Print Center New York, Peruvian North American Cultural Institute (ICPNA, Lima, Peru), Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW). As a master printer, Osterburg has worked with artists including Ida Applebroog, Lee Friedlander, Adam Fuss, David Lynch, McDermott and McGough, and Lorna Simpson. After working in Brooklyn for many years, he is now based near Red Hook, New York in the Hudson Valley and serves as Artist-in-Residence in printmaking at Bard College.

While in the Bay Area, Osterburg produced mixed-media landscape-and-architecture works that combined black-and-white photographs, gestural abstract drawing, scraps of burnt newspapers and small, linear wire sculptures; critics such as Kenneth Baker described their suggestions of devastation, war and decay as theatrical and bleak, yet bristling with energy, like the work of Anselm Kiefer. Osterburg exhibited at Southern Exposure and the Show n' Tell and Hatley Martin galleries, as well as shows in Germany, Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines.

In 1993, Osterburg started his own print studio specializing in photogravure, which he moved to New York City in 1994 (and Brooklyn in 2003). During an artist residency at MacDowell Colony in 1996, he met his wife and future collaborator, composer Elizabeth Brown. Since moving to New York, Osterburg has exhibited at Takara Gallery (Houston, 1996–8), Moeller Fine Art (New York and Berlin, 2003–11), Highpoint Center for Printmaking (2006), Fitchburg Art Museum (2007), Lesley Heller Gallery (2009–18), and Rockland Center for the Arts, CPW and ICPNA (all 2010), among others. He has been a member of the Studio Art faculty of Bard College since 1998, and taught printmaking at Cooper Union (2002–14), Pratt Institute, Columbia University and Lacoste School of the Arts in France. He has conducted photogravure workshops at art programs and institutions throughout the United States.

Osterburg's work combines the authority of photography with fanciful, rough models and real outdoor settings to create images suspended between real, imaginary and lost that obscure scale and period. He is a leading teacher and practitioner of photogravure, a 19th-century intaglio process combining printmaking and early photography techniques that was developed by Henry Fox Talbot and Karel Klíč and has remained largely unchanged and little-used. Photogravure's rich, velvety blacks, continuous infinite tonality, and sensitivity to textural effects—scratches, dust and traces resulting from Osterburg's choice to sometimes print with the backs of used copperplates—impart qualities of timelessness, poignancy, mystery and the hand-made to images.

Osterburg mines persistent images in his (and collective) memory, which he recreates in quick, intuitively built models devoid of people, stripped of superfluous detail, and made with humble, found materials: toothpicks, twigs, vegetables, glass doorknobs, broken umbrellas, books, refuse. He places the unpeopled models in carefully selected, sometimes far-flung settings (beaches, lakes or rivers, cities), then photographs them through a magnifying glass or macro lens so they appear life-size from a human vantage point, drawing viewers in as lone spectators. His subject matter has centered on moments of transit through time, space and imagination: sea, air and space vessels, books and art history, decaying and evolving urban scenes.
(source: wikipedia.org)