Granser Peter

Peter Granser was born in 1971 as an austrian citizen in Hannover, Germany. He is self-educated and lives in Stuttgart. Granser established already with his first project Sun Citya significant style and developed his work over the years. Video-sequences and sound accompany his photographs consistently since 2009.

Inspired by residencies in China and Japan, Granser founded project space ITO in 2015. He experiments there with unusual exhibition formats and with topics such as time, emptiness, nature and consciousness. These are also the themes that have been the focus of Granser’s personal projects of the past several years. At ITO ( japanese for thread ) he connects contemporary art with japanese and taiwansese tea and enables guests to concentrate on the moment while leaving room for communication.

Granser received numerous prizes and awards amongst others the Arles Discovery Award in 2002, the Oskar-Barnack Award in 2004 and the Helmut-Kraft-Foundation Talent Art Prize in 2011. In 2006 he was a stipendiary of Kunststiftung Baden-Wuerttemberg. His project Heaven in Cloudswas nominated in 2016 for the Jerusalem Museum´s Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography and selected for the artist book grant by Stiftung Kunstfonds in 2018.

In 2019 Granser received the Kubus. Sparda Audience Award for his exhibition at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart that showed an overview of his work of the last 10 years.

Granser´s work has been exhibited amongst many others at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh, FOAM Amsterdam, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Photo Espana, Kunsthalle Tuebingen, MAK Museum Wien, Kunstmuseum Reutlingen/Galerie, NGBK Berlin and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. 

(Source : Artist’s website)

Using a different register, the Nightsky photographs of German artist Peter Granser stand in contrast with realist photography of hyper-urbanised Chinese cities in the series Heaven in Clouds.

These large-format abstract photographs of lights that blend into one another, evoking hope by association, are a testament to the aesthetic force of colour, but also raise the question of the referent. If we know that these lights shine from LED ad displays and that the poetic blending of colour is due in part to air pollution, the abstract image necessarily brings us back to an awareness of reality.

(Source : Paul di Felice)