About Petra

"Already at the age of 9 Petra Gerwers had her first camera and since then she has felt that the medium of photography can offer her something quite extraordinary: a direct dialogue with the world around her without having to subordinate what she sees to a conceptual logic. Trusting in an intuitive perception, she develops a very personal, subjective visual language in various photographic projects.

Thus, her 2019 series Applause to Life is a hymn to life. Changing perspectives and formats combine in a dynamic image sequence on coloured backgrounds to create a psychedelic-looking road trip. Myth and reality, grounding and elevation are constantly wrestle with each other in a visual maelstrom. The result is an exuberant perception of the world, which also makes a reflexive view possible at a second glance. The often seemingly bizarre of curious insights into contemporary life evoke curious questioning. The happy fusion of pathos and irony celebrates life without succumbing to an uncritical idealization.

Photography also played an important role for Petra Gerwers in her previous work as a specialist teacher for mentally and physically handicapped children. For her, this medium is the best way to go satisfy her passion to connect with people and bring them together with other people.

Communication forms the central motif of what she does, and this is also the basis for her photography project "Time Travelers," in which she gives people a platform, a voice and visibility. What is essential about her portrait photography is that she does not want to create a clear image of her protagonists. In photographic images with multi-layered reflections, people are freed from a static representation of their personality and allow a glimpse behind the facade. The combination of the resulting portraits with children's pictures of the people depicted and the letters they wrote to themselves as children illustrates the photographer's core interest in not wanting to stop the world with a curious look at it, but to see in everything webs of relationships that are subject to constant change in a living process."

Text by Wolfgang Zurborn