Franziska RUTZ

The new digital photographs by the Swiss artist Franziska Rutz (born 1956 in Zurich) focus on the rapid changes in urban China. Gigantic conglomerations of skyscrapers, rubble heaps, and construction scaffolds transmit a menacing presence in inner-city spaces. Her works deal with the individual's wish for personal self-determination and reorientation on the one hand and the feelings of alienation and helplessness at the centre of a massive state-controlled structural transformation on the other.

The human being in his diverse surroundings and realities stands at the centre of Franziska Rutz' artistic oeuvre. Her newest images show people who cannot keep pace with the speed of structural expansion and have lost their orientation in the anonymity of the metropolises. Franziska Rutz' photographs explore everyday social organisms and diverse levels of reality by means of austere painterly and emotional results arrived at with overlappings, modifications, colour changes, and integrating people and pictorial objects into a new context. With these works, Franziska Rutz offers insights into the foreign, the unfamiliar and the culturally different.