With entrancing beauty and sensual colors Uwe Wittwer (*1954 in Zurich) lures anyone looking at his pictures into an odd, in-between realm. The contours of his still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and portraits always seem to float in front of a mysteriously dark background.The Collector’s Edition by Uwe Wittwer is a photogravure printed on copper, produced from a digitalized photograph from the 1930s. The motif appears as a negative, thus pointing out the way the decades and the transformation of the material have defamiliarized the appearance of the original. At the same time Wittwer takes the digitalized source material from the Internet and returns it, in a certain way, to its original form. While the scanning and electronic publication of old photographs robs them of some of their original substance and intimacy, they regain their hidden sides to a certain extent—and in a new way—through the artistic, transformational process. The motif of the sheet Die Rast (The Break) by Uwe Wittwer was transferred to the printing plate from a photograph before it was etched on copper. Imperfections are sometimes also transferred over to the plate in the heliogravure process, and the plate was additionally polished by hand to enhance the circles of light in the image.
