2024 | ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ
ELLIPSES
MONTREAL
Jul 4 - Aug 31, 2024

Blouin Division is pleased to present an exhibition of recent and historical works by celebrated German-born Canadian photographer, Angela Grauerholz. Since the early 1980s, Grauerholz has been creating unendingly compelling photographs that challenge the norms of her medium while developing a uniquely personal aesthetic that is unafraid to pursue themes rooted in emotion and a sense of romantic longing. Her work has attained international recognition and is exhibited and collected widely in important institutions across Canada, the United States, and Europe. She has participated in many international events of distinction, including the Sydney Biennale, Documenta IX, the Carnegie International, and the Montréal Biennale. For her accomplished oeuvre she has received a number of prestigious prizes, such as Quebec’s Prix Paul-Émile Borduas (2006), the Canada Council’s Governor General Award in Visual and Media Arts (2014), and in 2015, the distinguished Scotiabank Photography Award.

Ellipses brings together photographic works that span the artist’s career – from the 1980s to her most recent series created in 2022. The exhibition has been an occasion to plunge into the artist’s world, drawing you in forcefully with its enchanting and seductive aura. Before you have gotten your bearings, you find yourself walking alone through an empty park, watching the play of light and breeze through the sheer curtains that adorn your hotel room, or traipsing past sculptures and fountains on some trip you forgot you took. The emotional tour de force that is Grauerholz’s special class of photography is charmingly generous to those who behold it: her work envelops and ingrains, it lends and borrows a catalogue of seemingly subjective images not wholly defined or claimed.

Grauerholz’s images have the preternatural ability to be experienced as fragments of personal perception despite the understanding that they were framed by another. They feel immediately intimate, and yet remain vague as the fog of consciousness. They remind us of the experiences that find a way of lodging themselves in our deepest psychological recesses. Within this hazy state, a spell upon time itself seems to be cast, as the past and the future are absorbed into a single present moment: the moment of looking. Engaging with Grauerholz’s photographs awakens all of the senses as if one is reliving the memory of a past experience or a scene from a potential future. Standing before them, we construct a “reality” that feels tantalizingly close at hand while balancing the painful awareness that it never really was, or is. Although perhaps it will be, some day…