"Eisbruch"

Alpine glacier landscapes today offer a peculiar aesthetic. Long present in the collective memory as mighty and raw, they increasingly show their vulnerable, threatened, dwindling character. Michael Goldgruber has been exploring them artistically for years - with a clear eye for their monumental dignity, their fragility, and those strangely clumsy traces of human intervention that seek to preserve these natural spaces. Goldgruber's photographs and cinematic explorations sharpen the eye for man's ambivalent relationship to nature. They do not want to show, they show. They don't want to act, they have an effect.
(Bildrecht, Vienna)

Michael Goldgruber’s work reflects the significant, complex media coverage of landscapes and natural perception, through which the Romantic theme of the sublime dissolves within various screens of projection. He questions levels of observation and pre-formulated perspectives of landscapes in the transfer to photographic image and installation. The panorama view and the natural spectacle are seen alongside the architecture of consumption and possession. The guided view is intensified in Goldgruber’s artistic work resulting in experimental spaces of predetermined seeing. While people in fact take to constructions and apparatuses to admire the view, what prevails in Goldgruber’s photos and videos is the abyss and concrete, the paranoid babbles of voices and an eerie vastness. A smack of artificiality is always mixed in with the enjoyment of apparently authentic perceptions of nature.
(www.goldgruber.at)