Looking at photographs of Berlin artist Irina Schrecker for a while, one feels that these works want to tell more. There is a story inside them. Sometimes it is the coloring which brings the unreal to come to the fore and makes it prevail over reality. And sometimes it is the collage which brings a road scene into the realm of imagination. The frame performs the change, the subject stays untouched.
The coloration with pastel chalks is a balancing act between photography and painting, which succeeds because the photo remains the dominant element. The idea as the central thread stretching across the entire picture - this approach has it’s roots in Irina Schrecker’s journalistic work, where the idea represents the soul of an article. After stuying journalism in Leipzig from 1971 to 1975, she continued at the “School of Leizpzig” and learned her photographic craft from French professor Jean Michel Cavalli.
Berlin’s columnist Hans Heiner Reichelt wrote about an exhibition in 2001: “I know New York’s finest art galleries and marvelled before Miro’s masterpieces in Mallorca. But what I see here is matchless, a feast for the eyes! These works are picture-collages, mirrored worlds. Irina has raised pictures to a new life.”
