Giulietta Coates: Beyond Solitude

‘Beyond Solitude’ is the debut solo show of artist Giulietta Coates at BBA Gallery, Berlin. The exhibition brings together works from the last 4 years. At the core of the monochrome landscape photographs is her relationship to the beauty of nature: its painful otherness and the impossibility of becoming one with it. The melancholic photographs express a longing for what is unreachable and hold a certain nostalgia for things to be otherwise.

Photographs taken during walks with her dog are observations of nature’s beauty, and intimate conversations with the immediate landscape that surrounds the artist. Individual motifs such as puddles, marshy fields and tree stumps stand for larger narratives of death, beauty, nostalgia and longing, all of which are interconnected in nature. Coates turned to photography as a solution to living in a remote region of France. The constraint of photography as a smooth, surface medium sets up a longing for what it represents yet delivers nothing. The artist uses photography to overcome the gulf between herself and the total otherness of nature’s beauty. Presented on the outermost surface of wooden structures, the fragmented photographs are perceptual puzzles where corners of the natural world appear to the viewer from odd angles. The rich layers of imagery speak of our relationship to nature and connect us to a consciousness outside of our own.

Giulietta Coates (*1959, England) has been living and working in Haute Provence, France for the past 15 years. She studied printmaking at the Royal College of Art and comes from a tradition of drawing and handling materials. Coates has been part of multiple group and solo exhibitions across Europe and her works from the past 40 years - woodcuts, drawings, paintings - are in collections around the world. BBA Gallery has been representing Giulietta Coates since 2016.