Experiments in Time

Candela Books + Gallery is pleased to present Andreas Rentsch: Experiments in Time, a comprehensive view of Rentsch’s photographic career.

Andreas Rentsch is a New York based photographer who deliberately challenges conventional approaches to photography. Though Rentsch’s works exemplify the literal definition of photography, ‘writing with light,’ his emphasis on experimentation and chance yields an innovative hybrid of analog photography, uncertainty, and performance art.

Rentsch’s work is cerebrally tethered to themes of justice and empathy, informed by his childhood experiences growing up the son of a warden on a prison compound in Switzerland. In his more recent series, Entangled with Justice, Rentsch performs in front of the camera; using his own figure, though unrecognizable, to create narratives depicting the unjust treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib as well as public unrest in Afghanistan. Rentsch relies upon the random development and decay of Polaroid Type 55 film to reference the uncertain nature of human existence and emphasize the cruelty and vulnerability of incarceration.

Rentsch received his MFA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University. He is the recipient of several major awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and Polaroid Artists Support Grant. His work has been exhibited worldwide, and is in numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Polaroid Collection; the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, NY; Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium; Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland; Museet for Fotokunst in Odensee, Denmark; the Swiss Foundation of Photography in Winterhur, Switzerland; the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Germany; and the Foundation Gianada, in Martigny, Swizterland. Rentsch is an educator who taught at the International Center of Photography in New York from 2004 to 2015. Today, he resides in Huntington, NY and teaches photography at Mount Ida College near Boston.