INGAR KRAUSS
The Cat's Eye
February 13 through March 22, 2003

Arts & Letters
March 13, 2003

In "The Cat's Eye," his first New York exhibition, the German photographer Ingar Krauss also takes as his subject children on the cusp of adolescence, imbuing them with their own brand of wistful melancholy. Like the four protagonists of Ms. Weems's "May Days," Mr. Krauss’s subjects are pensive figures suspended in a dreamy, black and white world in which time seems to be temporarily frozen. Isolated in each portrait against a flat, patterned ground, and subject to intense chiaroscuro affects, the figures radiate a compelling kind of emotional intensity. They evoke a strong sense of imminent loss. In "(Untitled), Sarah," a thin, long-haired girl leans against a dark wallpaper covered with a floral pattern. Her eyes and features, partially obscured by the play of light and dark, hint at a hidden, inaccessible aspect of her existence. In "(Untitled) Sophia," a bare-chested girl with a brooding look on her face stares into the camera while holding a stalk of white lilies. And in Untitled (Tommi)," a young boy holding a poised wooden dagger poses in his underpants against a checkered cloth. The series as a whole is shaped by an almost disquieting sense of the thin line that separates these children's external appearance from their mysterious, unexplained internal worlds. In each of these photographs, the children's carefully staged poses and accessories underscore the tension between their apparent vulnerability and sensuality and their awareness of an outsider's intrusive gaze.