On Friday, May 3, 2024, at 7:00 pm, Quartz Studio is pleased to present Pastorale, the second solo show in Turin by the German photographer Ingar Krauss (East Berlin, Germany, 1965). A pastoral, from the Latin pastor (shepherd), is a motif in the visual arts that depicts the life of the shepherds in an idyllic rural landscape scene, as an ideal of rural simplicity and tranquility, as romantic images of closeness or return to nature. This motif of a “place of longing” for simple life in nature, which corresponds to ideas about the Garden of Eden in religious thought and feeling, reappears in the photographs of Ingar Krauss as a dreamlike inner scenery, personal and self-reflexive, referring to the rural as a metaphor. Ingar Krauss lives in a rather remote region of East Germany, near the river Oder, which separates Germany from Poland – a very secluded rural habitat. The peculiar features of his immediate environment are the source for his images, which were all made in a small radius around his house. They reveal the artist as deeply connected with his surrounding nature, particularly interested in a realism which is magical in a natural way, as an embedding of the wonderful and the terrible in the everyday. The enigma of how this relationship between reality and miracle can be felt through an image leads us into the mystery of the transformative forces that make an image a work of art. Ingar Krauss avoids all digital technology and defends analogue photography as an alchemical process where the creation of a photograph remains controlled by hand and is not calculated by programs, resulting in the image’s “appearance.”

Ingar Krauss (East Berlin, Germany, 1965) lives and works in Berlin and Zechin (Brandenburg, Germany). After learning a trade, performing military service, and working for many years as a psychiatric caregiver, he turned to photography in the mid-nineties and has since realized several photographic projects, in Germany and abroad. He has participated in numerous international group exhibitions, such as at the Hayward Gallery in London, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, the MACRO - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, and the International Center of Photography in New York. His works have been presented in solo exhibitions at the Goethe Institute in Paris, the Velan Center in Turin, the Kunsthalle Erfurt, and the Guardini Foundation in Berlin, as well as at galleries in Milan, Paris, New York, Atlanta, Stuttgart and Berlin. His publications include books by Hatje Cantz, Thames & Hudson, PowerHouse Books, Mondadori Electa, Kerber and Hartmann Books. His work is part of institutional and private art collections. The artist is represented by Galerie Camera Obscura, Paris; Galerie Springer, Berlin and Jaeger Art, Berlin.