Annelies Štrba - "Colourful unfolds my otherness"

Annelies Štrba (*1947) is an observer and magician: she captures fleeting moments and creates dream images; life and art flow into each other. When her children were small, the camera was part of everyday family life; at night, her mother developed her prints in the darkroom. Again and again, she acquired new techniques and forms of presentation, for example when she began her video works in the 1990s and most recently started to paint over photographs printed on canvas. While her earlier analogue works play with a snapshot aesthetic, the video stills and edited digital photographs achieve the intensity of expressionist paintings.

The Fotostiftung Schweiz collection includes a large group of Štrba's early black-and-white photo canvases and the colour photographs - intimate family scenes, but also bleak façades of prefabricated buildings and high-rises.

The retrospective exhibition, whose title quotes a poem by Emmy Hennings, presents these works for the first time. They are positioned around two newly composed projections of the work cycles with which Annelies Štrba translated her view of the family into images: Shades of Time brings together photographs taken between 1974 and 1997 and shows the children Sonja, Samuel and Linda growing up. Noonday is dedicated to her children's children. In the synopsis of these series, the intertwining of times becomes palpable. The pictorial worlds, characterised by subjectivity and intuition, merge into a comprehensive cosmos.