The artist and photographer Isabelle Graeff devotes her pictures to existential questions of life; they are in a search for self-determination and identity. Her series EXIT shifts the focus to an entire country, as the images describe closure, new beginnings, exiting, and arrival.

Graeff moved to England in 2015, where she had been a student and knew her way around. Yet, when she began taking pictures there she found a changed place: a country in crisis, on the edge of Brexit and divided, with the legacy of an epic history, but an uncertain prospect of the future. “In many of the photographs, the camera seems to glide silently through a world of decay in which the sound has been turned off. One can read EXIT as a snapshot of a land in crisis that has decided to leave the European Union, because it believes this is the right path – back to the past glory and autonomy of the Empire,” writes the critic Niklas Maak, describing the tone of the series.

When taking photographs, Isabelle Graeff begins as a silent observer of that feeling that seems to fuctuate between upheaval and change, as well as between mystical beauty and romantic nature. Graeff’s photographs were taken before the referendum, at a time when Brexit had not yet divided the nation. But EXIT is more than just an inventory: it also involves Graeff’s own confrontation with abandonment, the retreat from an old, familiar life, and the attempt to bid farewell and begin again.

At Sexauer, Isabelle Graeff has created a magical metropolis of glazed ceramics that looks like a phantasmagorical Manhattan from a distance: Hundreds of acorns lie between bulbous hollow moulds on which candles rise into the air like skyscrapers. The flames are reflected in the floor as if it were the black Hudson River; the glittering and flickering of the work is reminiscent of what people once sought in the great metropolises with their millions of fireplaces and what touches everyone heading towards the Manhattan skyline: the sight of something too big to be grasped all at once, of solemn, enormous energies and a greater warmth, the promise of disappearing into the foreign and being able to lead a different life - the complete opposite, in other words, of the strange battle cry of "more Bullerbü", under which political Berlin is currently working on the city's evaporation.

Niklas Maak, Bullerbü? Im Gegenteil! FAZ, 12.10.21

They are personal, subjective observations that seem like narratives. What will Brexit bring to the country? - this question acts as an invisible bracket between the photographs. It may be that Graeff's own melancholy colours her photos, but there is actually an air of farewell and disillusionment about them all. Unlike Parr, who is prepared to disavow his fellow countrymen, Graeff manages without cynicism. She manages to involve the viewer in looking closely at her pictures: There stands this man with the typical London "office" pinstripe suit, we only see the left cropped back view, everything hangs here. The trousers, the jacket, the crumpled briefcase are pulled downwards as if by an invisible undertow.

Gabriela Walde, Journey through a sad country, Berliner Morgenpost, 01.06.2018

Isabelle Graeff's style is British, which she produces photographically, but does not exhibit. In her photographs, she succeeds in allowing everyday life to take shape on its own terms, in all its regrettable ordinariness and all its surprising poetry.

Brigitte Werneburg, Proletarian pigeons in Hyde Park, TAZ, 01.06.2018

Graeff's still lifes are peppered with vanitas motifs, with the signs of the decay of time. Juicy red apples, bitten into, curtains faded, hydrangeas half withered and the tracks in the sand have already been blown away. But the people also symbolise a certain confidence. Graeff works intuitively and subjectively. She says that she develops her projects out of her life. In 2010, she made her breakthrough with the series "My Mother and I", a long-term observation of her relationship with her mother. Graeff does not stage her work. She only takes analogue photographs.

Beate Scheder, Thank you Brexit, Welt am Sonntag, 20.05.2018

The photographs are a project of self-exploration. They reach deep into the history of the portrait and the self-portrait. And since both mother and daughter often look eerily similar in this case, the series of pictures also becomes a new edition of the romantic image of the doppelganger. Which, in the case of a mother-daughter relationship, raises essential questions of identity formation.Graeff, who was born in Heidelberg in 1977 and studied art at London's Saint Martins College, is one of the most important figures of a new generation of artists who are conceptually taking a new approach to the medium of photography.

Mascha Kuchejda, Pictures of an Identity, FAZ, 15.10.2010

Monopol was enraptured, the FAZ judged: one of the most impressive photographic works of the Gallery Weekend.

Christoph Amend, ZEIT Magazin, Nr. 38, 2010

Eine der fünf besten Ausstellungen des Monats.

art Magazin, Mai 2010

Graeff also makes collages in addition to her great photographs. She also produces sculptures and films. The best thing about Isabelle Graeff and her ideas. Her examples, which are preceded by quite simple questions about identity and gender, are relentless but not victimised. The outcome always remains uncertain. The only certainty is that you breathe a sigh of relief when the pain subsides.

Silke Hohmann, Monopol, May 2010

The Berlin-based artist has been photographing herself and her mother for years; what we see is therefore only the first stage of a lifelong project that will lead to a point where the artist will be as old as her mother was at the beginning of the series - with all the existential questions about ageing and the formation of identity that this raises: Do I have the choice to become different; to determine my habitus; does one escape predetermined paths, what emancipations take place in the relationship between mother and daughter, what traces are left by the impacts of life – one of the most impressive photographic works of the Gallery Weekend.

Peter Richter, Mascha Kuchejda, Niklas Maak, Battle day of the artist class, FAZ, 02.05.2010

With a light hand, Isabelle Graeff goes where it gets uncomfortable - sometimes even for herself. When she takes photographs, Isabelle Graeff never stages them. The situations arise rather casually. At the lake, in a hotel room, in a meadow. Her portrait photographs of undressed female friends have an intimacy that is innocent and yet not naive. Isabelle Graeff is concerned with the questions that everyone has: relationships, power and trust, reflexes, origins, sex. With the difference that she pauses for a moment and takes pictures. Or video films, installations made from sugar-can lids and church windows. She lets things loose on each other that are usually kept as separate as possible. And see what happens. At best, there are sparks and a few scratches.

Silke Hohmann, Self-experiment with scratches, Traffic, December 2009