Vera Lutter

There’s just such overwhelming beauty and majesty and scale in Athens. I was always marveling at what moved the people of that time to build these structures.
—Vera Lutter

Gagosian is pleased to announce Fragments of Time Past, an exhibition of new work by Vera Lutter featuring photographs of Attica’s ancient architecture, together with her images of the Greek temples of Paestum, Italy, and of classical statues housed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Opening on April 7, 2022, this is Lutter’s first solo exhibition in Athens in more than fifteen years.

In response to an editorial commission—her first—from the New York Times Magazine, Lutter visited the Acropolis and Plato’s Academy in Athens, and the Temple of Poseidon in Cape Sounio in August 2021, braving the extreme heat and wildfires that threatened Greece that summer. Given the lengthy exposure times of her photographs, individuals passing through the sites have left no visible traces in the images, while the blurring of windswept trees contrasts with the unchanging solidity of the architecture. Employing the durational aspects of her medium—as opposed to the theoretical instantaneity of “the decisive moment”—and eschewing darkroom manipulation or digital alteration, Lutter engages with the fundamentals of photography. The scale, physicality, and temporality of her process create images that transform these ancient subjects, revealing their beauty in unprecedented, strikingly contemporary ways.