born 1971 in Frankfurt am Main, grew up in Chicago and New York. 1994 she studied Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and received her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1998 She retuned to Frankfurt in 2001.
EDUCATION
1998 MFA Photography and Related Media, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
1994 BFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
1989 Summer Sessions, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
EXHIBITIONS
2004 City Views", Gallery Christa Burger, Munich
ab 8. Juli 2004
2002 Déviation, Bee Hive one, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (one person show); The Ink Jetty, Neon Gallery, London, England (group show); Perfect Icons, South London Holding Company, London, England (street installation); "Asphalttapeten," Emerging Artists Program, Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg, Austria (one person show); "New Artists", Marc Aitnk, Amsterdam, Holland (goup show), "Sensation des Alltäglichen" (slide installation), Museum für Kommunikation, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (one person show); 2001 "artkrush," the artists run website, www.artkrush.com, (featured artist) 1999 "Untold Stories", De Chiara / Stewart, New York, NY (group show); Soho Photo Gallery's 1999 National Photography Competition, curated by Larry Fink, New York, NY ; 1998 Save the Garden, a Save the Garden event, New York, NY (group show) don’t let our youth go to waste, Visual Arts Gallery, New York, NY (MFA thesis show); American Photographic Institute, Tisch, New York, NY (group show); 1997 Ovation, The Arts Network, www.ovationtv/artszone.com (artists internet collaboration); Salon, student exhibition at SVA, MFA Photography and Related Media, New York, NY (group show); 1996 Salon, at SVA, MFA Photography and Related Media, New York, NY (group show); "On The Roof", Gallerie Anaké, Paris, France (one person show); 1995 BFA show, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; 1994 Reality or Fantasy, School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Chicago, IL (group show); 1992 Next Generation, Gallery 2, Chicago, IL (group show)
AWARDS
1998 3rd place, The 1998 The Photo Review National Photography Competition, juried by
Larry Fink, Langhorne, PA
1998 Fellowship, The American Photographic Institute, Tisch School of the Arts,
New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS
2002 Literaturen, Die Amerikaner Kommen, 03 März 2002, Berlin (p.10 – 23); 2001 Anja Conrad, Sensation des Alltäglichen, Edition Braus, Heidelberg. with a text by Klaus Honnef and Maureen P. Sherlock
Flash Art Review - Sommer 2002
Anja Conrad "Asphalttapeten" - Sammlung Essl, Wien
At first sight there is little spectacle in Anja Conrad’s photographs: they depict everyday sights such as people drinking or street advertisements. The banality of these motifs is in keeping with a long tradition; portraiture has been a genre since the beginnings of photography, and the cityscape has been a favorite subject for photography’s greatest masters, from Eugène Atget to Thomas Ruff. While that tradition could become a paralyzing burden, Conrad manages to find her own path within both fields, acknowledging and exploiting the significant difference between the human eye and that of the camera: “I propose to use photography in the search for further realities, trusting the shutter to reveal visual clues that the human eye can’t catch.”
What the human eye can’t catch — her images of billboards in particular such as Reaction — demonstrate Conrad’s understanding of that approach. While urban life with its numerous stimuli tends toward a numbing of attention and receptivity, thus preventing saturation, the artist uses her camera as a sensitive instrument to examine and reflect its surfaces and nuances. And so it is only through photography that public space becomes visible as a monstrous and heterogeneous collage of worlds differing in size and space. On the surfaces of large architectural bodies, towering over the camera placed on the ground, models appear larger than life; in their exhibitionistic attitudes they are distinct from the codes of ordinary behavior, representing utopias rather than seducing consumers. If photography is often thought of as mortifying, here it is used for a different purpose: to revive and present images — the daydream-like, ephemeral quality of reality, thus becoming a medium in a double sense: not only the bearer and vehicle of information, but also a permeable membrane between realities constituted by perceptions technically different, but equal in value.
Friedrich Tietjen
