Birgit Graschopf (1978, Austria) focuses in her photographs on the inner worlds of the depicted figures and on psychological nuances. Her visual language oscillates between an atmosphere of the familiar and intimate, and that of the foreign and uncanny. The artist presents mysterious, sometimes absurd-looking staged scenes that always place female figures at the center. They engage with the viewer in a distant yet captivating way and, with their theatrical presence, reference gestures we know from Romanticism and Surrealism; the former often seeks the inner, the unconscious even in the outer (nature, and in Birgit Graschopf‘s case, architecture), while the latter breaks rational orders and can open spaces for the irrational and the nonsensical. In playful yet refined ways, the artist combines the staging with chosen image carriers and brilliant materials that interact with the image motif: the glittering surfaces of sandpaper intensify the mysterious appearance of the image figure; the formed bubbles on the surface of the self-cast concrete slab merge with the lit Venetian facade placed on it, making it sensually more comprehensible precisely through this connection. Often, Birgit Graschopf colors her black-and-white photographs partially by hand, which, together with the prior manual application of the photo emulsion, adds a painterly aspect and significantly contributes to the image character.