Lothar Osterburg

Lothar Osterburg (born 1961) is a German-born, New York-based artist and master printer in intaglio, who works in sculpture, photography, printmaking and video. He is best known for photogravures featuring rough small-scale models of rustic structures, water and air vessels, and imaginary cities, staged in evocative settings and photographed to appear life-size to disorienting, mysterious or whimsical effect. New York Times critic Grace Glueck writes that Osterburg's rich-toned, retro prints "conjur up monumental phenomena by minimal means"; Judy Pfaff describes his work as thick with film noir–like atmosphere, warmth, reverie, drama and timelessness. and his work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress and Art Institute of Chicago, among others. He has exhibited at the International Print Center New York, Peruvian North American Cultural Institute (ICPNA, Lima, Peru), Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW). As a master printer, Osterburg has worked with artists including Ida Applebroog, Lee Friedlander, Adam Fuss, David Lynch, McDermott and McGough, and Lorna Simpson. After working in Brooklyn for many years, he is now based near Red Hook, New York in the Hudson Valley and serves as Artist-in-Residence in printmaking at Bard College. In his youth, he trained as a musician, playing double bass and piano, but turned to art at Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig, earning a degree in printmaking and experimental filmmaking.

While in the Bay Area, Osterburg produced mixed-media landscape-and-architecture works that combined black-and-white photographs, gestural abstract drawing, scraps of burnt newspapers and small, linear wire sculptures; Osterburg exhibited at Southern Exposure and the Show n' Tell and Hatley Martin galleries, as well as shows in Germany, Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines.

In 1993, Osterburg started his own print studio specializing in photogravure, which he moved to New York City in 1994 (and Brooklyn in 2003). Since moving to New York, Osterburg has exhibited at Takara Gallery (Houston, 1996–8), Moeller Fine Art (New York and Berlin, 2003–11), Highpoint Center for Printmaking (2006), Fitchburg Art Museum (2007), Lesley Heller Gallery (2009–18), and Rockland Center for the Arts, CPW and ICPNA (all 2010), among others. He has been a member of the Studio Art faculty of Bard College since 1998, and taught printmaking at Cooper Union (2002–14), Pratt Institute, Columbia University and Lacoste School of the Arts in France. He has conducted photogravure workshops at art programs and institutions throughout the United States. Photogravure's rich, velvety blacks, continuous infinite tonality, and sensitivity to textural effects—scratches, dust and traces resulting from Osterburg's choice to sometimes print with the backs of used copperplates—impart qualities of timelessness, poignancy, mystery and the hand-made to images.

Osterburg mines persistent images in his (and collective) memory, which he recreates in quick, intuitively built models devoid of people, stripped of superfluous detail, and made with humble, found materials: toothpicks, twigs, vegetables, glass doorknobs, broken umbrellas, books, refuse. His subject matter has centered on moments of transit through time, space and imagination: sea, air and space vessels, books and art history, decaying and evolving urban scenes.

Photogravures In the mid-1990s, Osterburg moved into sculpture and photography via the wire models he had built for his paintings.

In the early 2000s, Osterburg also explored images of flight (Zeppelin over Timbuktu, 2003; Channel Crossing with Hot Air Balloon, 2005).

New media collaborations Osterburg expanded into new media through collaborations with his wife, composer Elizabeth Brown, beginning in 2003. Osterburg created video projections for Brown's chamber opera, Rural Electrification (2006)—which explores the effects of the advent of electricity on a young rural woman—and for her guitar-and-Theremin work, Atlantis (2008). They developed the multimedia chamber opera A Bookmobile for Dreamers (Lincoln Center, 2013) during a Bogliasco Foundation residency; the dreamlike meditation on books, reading, libraries, culture and imagination combines live Theremin, recorded soundscape and Osterburg's imagery of a bookmobile making its rounds and offering entry into various worlds through books. Brown also wrote music for videos in Osterburg's later projects Piranesi and Babel, which were presented in conjunction with live performances.

Lothar Osterburg, The Tower of Babel, wood, cardstock and book pages, dimensions varying, 7' x 7' x 28', 2017. Installation at the Esther Massry Gallery, Albany, New York. Later projects Osterburg's later projects have increasingly explored imaginary architecture and cities inspired by speculation and memories of art, fiction, travel and reminiscences. Piranesi (2008–10, comprising a model, prints and stop-action video) was inspired by 18th-century printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri etchings of imaginary subterranean prisons; its theatrical scene features a vaulted ceiling, stone-like towers, elaborate winding stairs and drawbridges, and crude machinery.

Osterburg extended these themes with "Yesterday's Cities of Tomorrow," seeking to capture the mythical, longed for, and sometimes fantastical New York City imagined by Ellis Island immigrants or encountered in old books and movies. The series mixes history (old locomotives, zeppelins, mid-century cars, expressway on-ramps), fantasy, and familiar landmarks (the Brooklyn Bridge and Flatiron Building, elevated trains) in photogravures such as Twilight, 1984 (2011) and Night (2012); Zeppelins docking at Grand Central (2013), described in The New Criterion as a remarkable "steampunk" image, was featured with its playful model in the MTA Arts show "On Time/Grand Central at 100."

Two series celebrating the printed word and cultural diversity grew out of A Bookmobile for Dreamers. "Library Dreams" consists of photogravures of child-like wonder—bookmobiles, a locomotive bursting into a library (referencing Magritte's Time Transfixed), or Literary City (2013), a book city floated on the East River and shot in scale against the Manhattan skyline. the China Printmaking Museum, Chazen Museum of Art, the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum (Germany), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Spencer Museum of Art, among others.