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[e] up monumental phenomena by minimal means"; Judy Pfaff describes his work as thick with film noir–like atmosphere, warmth, reverie, drama and timelessness. Osterburg has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and New York Foundation for the Arts, 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, Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano (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. Early life and career Osterburg was born in Braunschweig, West Germany, in 1961. 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. After participating in a university exchange program in San Francisco, he immigrated to the United States in 1987 and worked as a printer at the de Soto Workshop (San Francisco) and Graphicstudio (Tampa) and as master printer at Crown Point Press in San Francisco, where he learned the process of photogravure on a project for artist Christian Boltanski. 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; critics such as Kenneth Baker described their suggestions of devastation, war and decay as theatrical and bleak, yet bristling with energy, like the work of Anselm Kiefer.