Zion Homestead, 2007 - Lothar Osterburg

The artist Lothar Osterburg's mastery of photogravure, a process dating back to photography's inception, lends an otherworldly cast to his painstaking images, which seem to exist in a perpetual twilight between reality and fiction, waking and sleeping. Drawing inspiration from his dreams and memories, the artist constructs small-scale models in his studio of his scenes—which range from boats gliding on silvery waterways to spaceships in flight to the brownstones and subways of New York City—and photographs them, then uses those pictures to as the basis for the final intaglio prints.

The complex photographic procedure gives the results a tonal range of texture and nuance that surpasses normal photographic prints, making the fictitious images seem almost hyper-real, lush, and romantic. Osterburg's work has been exhibited internationally, with presentations at the International Print Center in New York (2009), the Highpoint Center for Printmaking (2006), the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano in Peru (2010), and the Rockland Arts Center in Nyack, New York (2010). Osterburg has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2010), the AEV Foundation Grant (2009), and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (2003 and 2009).
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