English
Italiano
Michael Utz
Born in Karlsruhe, South West Germany and passionate about photography since he was 16. For many years he dedicated himself to black and white photography and analog.
Formal rigor, new objectivity and reduction are present in various forms as stylistic criteria of his images. Over the years he has had many exhibitions in his home country and abroad. Since 2012 he has been collaborating in many works with the artist Christian V. Grumbkow.
For some time, he has been trying to capture "perception and sensation" in his images, finding interest in the process that optical perception triggers as the sensations go hand in hand with perception, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes massive. Associations, connotations, memory, desire, joy, sadness are the whole scale of what determines and distinguishes us as sensitive individuals. His sources of inspiration are visual arts, painters, literature and other photographers. He defines the collaboration with his friend and painter Christian V. Grumbkow a happy but not accidental coincidence.
Christian Grumbkow
Christian grew up in Germany, in Wuppertal near Düsseldorf, cultivating a great passion for music since he was a child that led him to join a blues music band as a guitarist. He loved designing posters whose subjects were musicians. At the age of 15 he became acquainted with the music of the Beatles in England, and decided he wanted to be a musician. His parents and teachers did not approve this vocation of his, their pressure led him to be a young rebel.
This frustration was soon translated into art, painting. These two passions for art and music accompanied him throughout his life leading him to become a professional painter once his career as a rock musician in the Hoelderlin band ended.
His art studies in Wuppertal and later in Amsterdam expanded his visual sphere, leading him to focus on landscapes and the evolution of natural processes such as seasons, buds, flowering and more extreme landscapes such as those in Iceland, Canaries, Bali, the Rocky Mountains, Sri Lanka, New Mexico... These had a decisive influence on his style, which he himself defines as “abstract landscape painting”. His paintings are in demand all over the world, Christian is called "the magician of colors".
