Angela Grauerholz (b.1952, Hamburg, Germany)

Angela Grauerholz (b.1952) creates artwork that invites viewers to speculate. In Crowd, a group of people stand around, some with hands in their pockets, many with their backs turned, a few in motion. Instead of showing what the crowd is doing and where they are, her photograph provokes questions about subjective experience, the unconscious, and memory. Grauerholz is known for her skillful exploration of formal elements such as focus and framing to evoke the passage of time and the enigmatic nature of memory.

The German-born Grauerholz has been based in Montreal since 1976. She is a graphic designer and artist, and in 1980 she co-founded Artexte, a centre for information about contemporary Canadian visual art. In 1984–85, inspired by her interest in women’s participation in the arts in Canada, Grauerholz made a portfolio depicting sixteen women including art historian and curator Jean Blodgett, and film producer and director Monica Haim. These intimate portrayals show the women glancing away or in moments of reflection. Their close-up vantage point and blurry resolution convey impressions of the sitters, rather than the more conventionally posed renderings found in more formal portraiture.  These photographs emerge from personal interactions between the subjects and photographer and offer glimpses of some of the thoughtful, talented women who were transforming the arts at this time.

In her work from the late 1980s, Grauerholz explores unconscious experience and time through photographing people and spaces for waiting, as seen in works such as Sofa, 1988, and Harrison, 1989, which shows people on a train station platform. Grauerholz has often preferred to make a series of images over a single photograph, and she worked with the serial format to explore collections and archives in her work during the 1990s and 2000s. She received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2014 and the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2015. Grauerholz is professor emeritus at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), where she taught design and photography from 1988 to 2017.