Claas Gutsche (born in 1982 in Blankenburg, Germany) studied at the Burg Giebichenstein Hochschule für Kunst und Design Halle from 2003 to 2006 and earned his master’s degree in printmaking from the Royal College of Art in London in 2009. He has exhibited extensively in Germany and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include Cut and Close, Lyonel-Feiniger-Galerie, Quedlingburg, Germany (2017); Claas Gutsche. Cracks in Concrete at the Museum Franz Gertsch in in Burgdorf, Switzerland (2016); Constructed Utopia at the Kunstverein virtuell-visuell e.V., Dorsten, Germany (2015); and Shadow (2016), Changing Truth (2014), and Drama & Romantik (2012), all at Galerie WAGNER + PARTNER, Berlin. His work is in several public collections such as the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main, the Royal College of Art Print Collection, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gutsche’s work addresses the way architecture influences our memory of a specific time, and the way images, particularly photographs, retrospectively alter these impressions. His latest work explores former East German (GDR) architecture and remains. He often works in linocut because it offers the possibility of creating large formats and the medium produces dramatic compositions of light and shadow that suggest an atmosphere at once threatening and sublime.

Gutsche spent five days in April 2017 working with us on two screenprints at the Print Association Bentlage in Rheine, Germany. The Arrival depicts the view from the artist’s Berlin studio of a building that was formerly part of the Stasi restricted zone during the East German (GDR) era, and now houses Syrian refugees. In the context of an overcast, inhospitable winter evening, the edifice at first seems to beckon the newcomer, but this stark, ominous structure presents a disquieting sanctuary with its chilly glow of institutional lighting. Shift evokes a similar sense of unease. A typical soupy winter night in Berlin is illuminated by three streetlights that cast a harsh and acidic glow on the branches within their reach. The only sign of human life is suggested by the blue light that emanates from a television through three windows. The title Shift conjures up the late, solitary return home of someone working a night shift, as well as the potential shiftiness or treacherousness of the obscure and eerie surroundings.