Petra Wunderlich

Petra Wunderlich was born in 1954 in Gelsenkirchen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. She lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany. She studied between 1985 and 1988 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris and the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Hochschule für Bildende Künste (M.F.A.).

Some of her teachers were Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, and Thomas Struth. She is a professor of photography at the University of Lucerne, Department of Art and Design. She became known internationally for her series of stone quarries. Architecture is one of the main subjects in her practice, and she has produced numerous photos series of religious buildings.

One of the best known is a series of synagogues in New York. These buildings are all presented absolutely frontal, some isolated and some embedded in the urban structure. In New York's street alignments, these buildings come in appearance only as a facade. Important for the artist is, that there is always an optimal architectural presence of the documented buildings.