JULIA HETTA – OUT OF CONTEXT
2016-04-11Julia Hetta is a photographer of the digital age but unlike many of her peers that have a new-found interest in shooting on film today, she has a long and passionate history with the old craft of picture making, exposed to photography since childhood through her father who had a darkroom in their basement in Uppsala. The three years she spent studying photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam involved infinite hours of solitary dedication in the darkroom. It was a period she remembers as lonely and peculiar, finding solace in the Rijksmuseum where the faces portrayed in the master paintings became real, like flesh and blood in front of her peering eyes.
Indeed, when looking at Hetta’s pictures, ones mind travels back to early Netherlandish painting, particularly to those of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden whose innovative use of oil enhanced the emotional realism in portraiture by new descriptive techniques. The sense of meditation and inner life seen in these 15th century paintings can also be seen in Julia’s photo graphs. Like her predecessors she is intensely interested in the effects of daylight; her timeless figures emerging gracefully from unadorned settings of simple, often obscured backgrounds. The sophisticated combinations of the objects and rich textures of her still-life are skillfully described and there is aquiet, graceful reflectiveness to her motifs.
Exhibition runs through till May 21st, 2016
Exhibition space Stockholm
Sibyllegatan 26
11442 Stockholm
Sweden
