Margherita Spiluttini

Zaha Hadid, and fellow Austrians such as Adolf Krischanitz, Hermann Czech, henke & schreieck, and Coop Himmelblau, to name but a few. She captures their buildings via the precise analysis of location, space, and light, lending such photographs a highly distinct quality that is also evident in her landscape photography. An important series that documents human intervention in nature is “Beyond Nature. Constructions of Landscape” [Nach der Natur. Konstruktionen der Landschaft¹], which was published as a book in 2002 and captures thorough perspectives on landscapes exhibiting traces of human activity that have altered many aspects of what nature used to be. These photographs, while being devoid of any people as in most of Spiluttini’s work, show the interference of civilization as an unavoidable effect of human activity and economic development. Yet there are exceptions where people appear in the foreground of representation, like in her series of Vienna’s former Southern Railway Station: this sequence of color slides, taken there in 1986, deals with passenger traffic and shows travelers roaming about the platforms. And in other instances, Spiluttini took portraits of colleagues like Austrian artist Heinz Frank or focused on personal settings in a way that confirmed the artistic stance behind every one of her photographs. In terms of international photographic history, Spiluttini’s works have revolved around culturally significant buildings constructed since the latter half of the 20th century that are embedded in the memory of many architectural critics and will continue to be so in the years to come. W.S.