Lothar Osterburg (born 1961) is a German-born, New York-based artist and master printer in intaglio, who works in sculpture, photography, printmaking and video.Pfaff, Judy. "Timeless Constructions," Art On Paper, November/December 2004, p. 46–7.Beeson, John. "Lothar Osterburg at Lesley Heller Gallery," Bomb Magazine, October 19, 2009. Retrieved August 10, 2020.Smithson, Aline. "Lothar Osterburg: at Sea," Lenscratch, April 14, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2020. 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.Cotter, Holland. "10 Galleries to Visit on the Lower East Side," The New York Times, April 16, 2015, p. C34. Retrieved August 10, 2020.Walde, Gabriela. "Ich baue mir ein Schloss wie im Märchen," Berliner Morgenpost, March 2, 2011, p. 19.Donohoe, Victoria. "Lothar Osterburg, Haverford College," The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 10, 2002. 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.Glueck, Grace. "Lothar Osterburg 'At the Edge of the Real,'" The New York Times, September 19, 2003, p. E39. Retrieved August 10, 2020.
Osterburg has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and New York Foundation for the Arts,Artforum. "2010 Guggenheim Fellows Announced," News, April 17, 2010. Retrieved August 10, 2020.Rosenberg, Bonnie. "Photogravure Finish," CityArts, April 7, 2010, p. 4.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Lothar Osterburg, Fellows. Retrieved August 6, 2020. and his work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress and Art Institute of Chicago, among others.The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Piranesi State 1, 2008, Lothar Osterburg, Collection. Retrieved August 12, 2020.Art Institute of Chicago. Lothar Osterburg, Artists. Retrieved August 12, 2020. 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).Pascale, Mark. "A Few Remarks," Anchor Graphics, Columbia College Chicago, Spring 2008.Gereda, Ernesto Carlín. "Espacios Imaginados," El Peruano (Lima Peru), March 10, 2010. As a master printer, Osterburg has worked with artists including Ida Applebroog, Lee Friedlander, Adam Fuss, David Lynch, McDermott and McGough, and Lorna Simpson.Bard College. Lothar Osterburg, Faculty. Retrieved August 7, 2020. 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.
Early life and career Osterburg was born in Braunschweig, West Germany, in 1961.Klötzer, Gunter (ed). Germans in America, Stuttgart, Germany: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2008, p. 102–3, 220–1. Retrieved August 10, 2020. 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.Non-Native New York. Lothar Osterburg, 2010. Retrieved August 10, 2020. 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.Lenfant, Natalie. "Earth, crayon and burnt newspaper provide artistic media for Student Union exhibit," Golden Gater, February 18, 1988, p. 6.Crohn, Jennifer. "Out in the Open," San Francisco Bay Guardian, November 6, 1991, p. 21.
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;Brunson, Jamie. "Matching Material and Concept," Artweek, April 2, 1988, p. 5. 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.Baker, Kenneth. "The Art of Social Criticism Back in Vogue," San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 1988.Thomas, Sherry Lee. "Ideals," Artweek, February 21, 1991. 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.Weichardt, Jürgen. "Ein junger Künstler stellt im Amtsgericht aus," Nordwest Zeitung, February 6, 1989.Kato, Emiko. "Sincere Attitude for Art Market: Six New American Artists," Atelier Magazine of International Art (Japan), December 1991.
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.NewMusic USA. "A Bookmobile for Dreamers," April 2013. Retrieved August 10, 2020.Elizabeth Brown official website. Retrieved August 16, 2020. 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.Metzger, Michael. "Photogravure," Southwest Journal, February 13–26, 2006, p. 29.Lama, Luis E. "Megaeventos," Caretas (Lima Peru), March 25, 2010. 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.The Cooper Union. "Lothar Osterburg Exhibitions and Screenings," About. Retrieved August 7, 2020. He has conducted photogravure workshops at art programs and institutions throughout the United States.
Work and reception 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.Freestone, Jenny. "About the Cover Artists – Lothar Osterburg," Washington Print Club, Summer/Fall 2014, p. 2–4. 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.Morrish, David and Marlene MacCallum. Copperplate Photogravure: Denystifying the Process, Amsterdam, Boston: Focal Press, 2003. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Highpoint Center for Printmaking. "Strangely Familiar" Photogravures by Lothar Osterburg," Press Time, Spring/Summer 2006, p. 1–2. 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.Rochelle Feinstein, Rochelle. "Rethinking Genres in Contemporary Photography: Artifacture," Art On Paper, January-February 1999, p. 30–5.Douglas, Sarah. "The photogravures of Lothar Osterburg: at the edge of the real," The Art Newspaper, October 2003.Rodriguez, Juan. "Dennis Begg and Lothar Osterburg at Traywick Gallery," Artweek, May 2000.
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.Spear, Peggy. "Ship Shape," Diablo Arts Journal, January-March 2001.Beeler, Monique. "Prints charming at Kala Institute," The Oakland Tribune, February 16, 2001.Tindall, Blair. "Set sail for Bedford Gallery's 'Adrift' exhibit," The Sunday Times, January 28, 2001, p. C1. 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.Anderson, Maggie. "Reinventing Photography, with Memory," The Daily Iowan, March 8, 2007, p. 5C.Robinson, Walter. Review, Artnet, October 2003.Haber, John. "From Metropolis to Batman," Haberarts.com, February 27, 2012. Retrieved August 10, 2020.
Photogravures In the mid-1990s, Osterburg moved into sculpture and photography via the wire models he had built for his paintings.Lampen, Liz. "Lothar Osterburg: Imaginary Places," Bi-College News, March 5, 2002. Over the next decade, he began fleshing out incomplete but skillfully constructed miniatures out of found materials, which he staged, photographed, and printed as black-and-white photogravures. His earlier photogravures combine drama, whimsy and the mythic, depicting sea vessels in various states (Fram, 1997; Cargo Ship in Storm, 2002; Safe Harbor and Wreck of the Somerset, 2004), rickety, rustic structures (Thorn Boat Marina, 1998; Vietnamese Waterwheel, 2001), and interiors carved from bits of soap (Soap Library, 2001).Lynch, Kevin. "Visions of energy and hope," The Capital Times, May 9, 2002.
Reviews describe these images as beyond documentary or appropriated photography, baffling in their mix of mute, rough-hewn forms, deceptive composing and real settings, whose effects of mist, morning dew, fog, even wind, are captured by photogravure's infinite tonality. Works such as Tidepool Lighthouse (2000) or Floating Village in Halong Bay (2005) offer seemingly historic, rugged New England and Southeast Asian coastal scenes, only to be revealed as models resting on tidal algae or shallow pools.Tindall, Blair. "Old technique, new twist," Contra Costa Times, February 19, 2001. Others portray vaguely convincing maritime dramas, as in Shackleton (2000) or Flat Earth (2006), which depicts a boat heading into a waterfall at the end of the world. After turning to new imagery for a decade, Osterburg returned to the sea in the show "Waterline" (2018), referencing rising seas, historic floods and geologic change through photogravures of imperiled boats and an installation of boat models, hung hip-high along an imaginary waterline.Wall Street Art. "Lothar Osterburg," November 20, 2018.
In the early 2000s, Osterburg also explored images of flight (Zeppelin over Timbuktu, 2003; Channel Crossing with Hot Air Balloon, 2005). Art Newspaper critic Sarah Douglas noted such works for the "humble strangeness" of their construction and dust-marked, scratched surfaces, which she compared to silent film stills or the "delightfully eerie" films of the Brothers Quay. Osterburg's flight interests culminated in images of ancient-yet-futuristic vessels and spacecraft hovering over shadowy shanty and shack cities in his show, "Strangely Familiar" (2006, Highpoint Center), and his series of planets populated by gigantically scaled boats, bridges and condominiums (e.g., Babylon, 2008), which were inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince.Plasse, Sabina Dana. "Take adventure in art at Ochi," Idaho Mountain Express, July 1, 2009.
New media collaborations