About
When she was a schoolgirl, she did her homework while her mother modulated teeth at
the kitchen table, and Julia herself loved to play with those dental models.
As a teenager,she was inspired by the art of Claes Oldenburg, whose oversized ice sculptures
made from soft fabrics gave her the feeling that she could sense the furry surface on her tongue
only by looking at it.
Discovering the work of Joseph Beuys, she was mostly impressed by the story of the »Fettecke«,
a sculpture made of five kilograms of butter that got removed by the caretaker of
the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1986, as he couldn’t stand the smell of the old fat in this
one corner of Beuys’ former atelier anymore.
It is exactly this special love for unusual objects and weird stories that draws Julia’s
attention.
Starting her training as a photographer in a big still life studio in Karlsruhe, she loved
to shoot in strange locations like a shampoo filling line by night or stage a stuffed
hamster so accurately, that it looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the final studio shot.
That is where she learned to be a perfectionist, only to have the opportunity to play
around with it and to give the tripod a little push at the very last moment.
From there, Julia worked at a funfair, where she shot and sold key ring portraits in
fake crocodile leather covers for some shady guys, she assisted at the renowned Spring
Studios in London, she exhibited her works at venues including the Photokina in Köln and
the Foto-Triennale in Esslingen and she worked closely with the internationally renowned
photographer Esther Haase in Hamburg, where she has settled with her family after years
of being on the move.
Julia’s art follows an aesthetic of imperfection that draws its brilliance from the
curiosity of the everyday and propagates the sensuality of the profane.
The series »Pat & the Jap Cap« captures her partner’s journey to his old friends in Ireland,
fitting their clothes, and trying on their lives and their homes.
With »A Portait Call«, Julia took a sneak peek into the homes of creative working people
during the lockdown in 2020, perceiving their new ways of living, using Zoom as a peephole,
and co-directing the images with the models themselves.
It is pretty much this kind of collaboration between the photographer and the protagonists
that works within Julia’s imagery.
Shooting on location, there are many layers and stories finding their way through the worn up
surfaces, the cracks, and the marks.
It’s those living things, those weird little objects and edgy sights, that come to life.
Then, sometimes, there is this roughness, this granularity, the fleetingness of the moment,
it is so tangible that one can feel it disappearing while looking at it.
And then again there is the brightness and perfection of the studio, the extended moment,
the idea brought into focus, as in the series »Curses«, where the curse words are written on the
model’s body – her face, her back, her clothes. And »Hell« is only one of them.
-Lisa Schmidt-
Exhibitions
#011 “Heimat”2025, Gruppenausstellung,
Taylor Wessing & Galerie Holthoff, Hamburg
“Sonah und die Ferne” Kooperation with Mavie Bellay, Foto-Triennale Esslingen
“Parkhaus”, Gruppenausstellung, Photokina, Köln
“Himmelstürmer”, Einzelausstellung, Wagenhallen, Stuttgart
Contact
Julia Grudda mail(@)juliagrudda.de +49 177 4653109
Hamburg & Cologne basedail{@}juliagrudda.de