Andrea Grützner’s “Erbgericht” centres on the Erbgericht Polenz, a country inn in eastern Saxony. The name Erbgericht refers to a regional form of jurisdiction with medieval roots. The building opened in 1898 and contains a historically evolved collage of materials and spaces tied to the memories of local people. Grützner, who was born in Pirna in 1984, has worked on this photographic series for a decade. Rather than showing nostalgic provincial scenes, she stages the deserted, angled interior before an analogue camera, sometimes using coloured flash, producing intensely colourful shadow geometries that superimpose fragments of space and objects in a painterly manner. Large double-sided abstract compositions are rotated ninety degrees in the book, creating a playful sense of vertigo and gradually revealing traces of use.

Published by Hartmann Books with the ISBN 978-3-96070-113-2, the book is listed as a 2024 publication. The 128-page volume contains 114 illustrations. Text contributions are by Eric Meier and Cora Waschke, and there is an interview between Jeannette Brabenetz and Andrea Grützner. The concept is by Johanna Flöter and Andrea Grützner; the design is by Johanna Flöter, Hamburg. The publisher gives the languages as German and English. The extended seven-colour offset printing process and the tactile layering of different surfaces intensify the pull of this pictorial cosmos and reflect the artist’s process. The project was supported by Kulturstiftung Freistaat Sachsen and ArsVersa Kunst-Stiftung, Freiburg. An exhibition was held at Hartmann Projects, Stuttgart, from April 5 to May 23, 2025.

This is a photographic book, with Grützner as photographer and Meier and Waschke as essay authors. The publisher’s page title links Andrea Grützner with Erbgericht, and the publisher lists the texts and interview separately from the photography. The book’s layout and printing are integral to the presentation of the series, but its subject remains the inn and Grützner’s decade-long engagement with it.