Growing up in the Austrian alps, Anita Gratzer began her professional career as a analogue photographer and graduated with honours from the University of Art in Linz, Austria. During her studies, Anita received her first scholarships from the Austrian Foreign Ministry to travel to Krakow and Paris. This was followed by numerous grants and awards, including the Austrian State Scholarship for Photography.

Travelling through Asia and America, Anita Gratzer first worked on her series ‘Human Time Anatomy’ and ‘Fragmented Gods’ in Berlin, Vienna and Krakow. In the late 1990s, she exhibited at Art Basel, in Vienna with Rong Rong, and was teaching in Greece and working in New York for three years.

In 2015, after over a decade of maternity leave, Anita Gratzer is exhibiting a new body of work. It articulates her memory of lost stories, her interest in Eastern traditions and forges links between them and the world as it is experienced today.

Anita Gratzer’s work is often about transfiguration, referencing materials and histories of the past to address references that are still relevant today. Drawing on the heritage of Christian iconography as well as Asian mythology and cultural lore, the artist layers pre-existing history with new narratives to create cross-cultural references. This creates a psychological field of pathos and transience that uses organic materials such as paper, textiles, wax, and others to create tender wrappings and forms.

As an artist she has been invited to China, South Korea, Iran, the Baltic States and multiple times to Italy, Finland, Japan and Switzerland. These residencies, which usually lasted several months, led to solo exhibitions and participations in biennials such as those in Nakanojo, Japan. Next to art-magazines, her work has been published in books by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, collected by institutions as Swatch, Switzerland and the Serlachius Foundation in Finland and was shown in Museums and galleries in Vienna, Shanghai, Daegu, New York, Tokyo and Rome.

In 2019 Anita Gratzer established to buy a studio and traditional wooden house outside Tokyo in Gunma Prefecture, where she now develops architectural garments on a larger scale.