Loretta Lux
(Dresden, Germany, 1969 - )
Europe, German
Lux combines photography and painted backdrops using Ilfochrome, a dye destruction positive-to-positive photographic process. Lux, not unlike a director holding auditions and creating scenery for a play, casts the models for her photographs, paints backgrounds by hand, and digitally assembles her compositions. Growing up in East Germany, Lux felt lucky to have been twenty years old when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, just after she moved to Munich. She earned a degree in painting at the Academy of Visual Arts in Munich in 1996. She began experimenting with photography in 1999, using herself as a model. After developing her technique of combining photography, computer manipulation, ilfochrome printing, and painting, she moved away from self-portraiture and instead, began photographing her friends’ children. Lux had her first show in 2004 at the Yossi Milo Gallery, New York City. The show received glowing reviews and garnered Lux an enormity of publicity. After her 2004 breakout, there was a huge demand for her work and less than a year later, she received the Infinity Award for Art from the International Center of Photography. Lux continues to produce work from her studio in Monaco, Germany but by and large, chooses to remain out of the limelight. Lux has had substantial exhibitions in Munich, Amsterdam, and New York. In 2004, Yossi Milo Gallery in New York held Lux’s first solo exhibition in the United States, “Loretta Lux.” Her work has been critiqued in Aperture, ArtForum, the New York Times, Village Voice, The New Yorker and Frieze. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and several other museums are home to her photographs.
View objects by this artist.