Annelies Štrba’s work is above all about her life: her family, her travels, her homes. Wife, mother, then grandmother and initially self-taught, she photographs her domestic world, pieces made by her jeweller husband and worn by their children, moments of intimacy and of sleep. The profusion of images she generates leads her towards the archetype. By extension of her own creation of images as a mother, she has come to explore the iconographic figure of the Madonna. The photographs she takes are a material that she manipulates to exploit their physical properties. In capturing photograms, solarising the films and printing them on canvas mounted on a stretcher, she investigates the ways in which the image becomes an object in the age of its dematerialisation. In this way, she gives her work a pictorial dimension that, on one hand, questions the almost “magical” status of the image printed by light and, on the other hand, brings out a nostalgic fascination for outdated renderings and finishes at a time when technological progress has made the means of producing extraordinarily precise images readily available. Rather than going against the tide of technical and aesthetic developments, Štrba thus highlights without irony the contradictions of an era.

Annelies Štrba was born in Zug in 1947. She lives and works in Richterswill and Ascona.