PETRA WUNDERLICH (GERMANY) PHOTOGRAPHS ORGANIZED BY THE GOETHE INSTITUTE 27/2 - 29/3 1998 MACEDONIAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART TU - SA 10.00 - 14.00, 18.00 - 21.00 SU 11.00 - 15.00 Petra Wunderlich (b. 1954, in Gelsenkirchen) started out as a painter; by 1979, however, she had abandoned all other visual media to express herself solely through the medium of photography. Churches and quarries are her central themes. Facades, door-frames, columns, pillars and other architectural features, anonymous human creations carrying within themselves the tradition of centuries that, seen autonomously, isolated from their initial structures, acquire a new morphological substance. "My pictures frequently contain references to the history of art", says the artist, in allusion to Bernd Becher, who has been a source of inspiration to all his students, and his multi-facetted approaches to works of classical art. Quarries empty of any human presence reveal forms shaped by nature and by human intervention. Petra Wunderlich elicits an atmosphere full of the tension created between the anonymous sculptures, chiselled out of the quarry wall as the stone was removed, and the crystalline form of the ancient rock, an equally anonymous sculptural creation, the work of nature in bygone ages.