Press release

The Baldwin Gallery is pleased to present its first show with the internationally acclaimed contemporary photographer Vera Lutter. To produce her one-of-a-kind paper negatives, Lutter works with what must be the most elementary of photography tools: the camera obscura, a tool that can be as simple as a pinhole in a piece of paper. With it, she creates evocative panoramic images of often familiar land and cityscapes, but her staging and process disorient the viewer. Her transpositions of light and darkness seem to heighten the contrasts, making the usual more stark. Lutter buildings are lit up as though illuminated by a nuclear blast in a sky filled with soot and smog, setting her point of view squarely in the modernism of mid-century industrial age.

Vera Lutter was born in Kaiserslautern, Germany. She studied art at the Munich Academy and at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she currently resides. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dia Foundation, New York; Kunsthalle, Basel; and Museum of the City of New York. Her photographs are in several permanent collections, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Additionally, Lutter is the only contemporary artist to be included in the recently opened Neue Galerie in New York.

Also showing is a new series by Brooklyn artist Milton Rosa-Ortiz. In “The Dodekatheon, according to Milton”, the gods of ancient Greece serve as exquisite ciphers for the conflicts of culture and religion that have followed them in more recent world history. The artist has created delicate relief sculptures of the twelve Olympian gods out of topographically arranged pins and brilliant Swarovski crystals imbedded in a surface of black velvet. Rosa-Ortiz has often drawn on his architectural background to create the illusion of three-dimensional objects in space, rather than flattening his complex allegories into two dimensions. Originally from Puerto Rico, he earned a B.A. in architecture from Kansas State University in 1993, after studies in Italy and Hungary. This is Rosa-Ortiz’s second show with the Baldwin Gallery. Rosa-Ortiz had his first solo museum show in 2006-07 at The Museum of Puerto Rico in San Juan, and shows extensively throughout the Americas.

Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.