| | | |  | | | Roger Ballen
Closed Eye, 1997
from the series "Outland"
Silver gelatine Fiber based image
36,5 x 24,5 cm
© Roger Ballen, Courtesy Les Douches La Galerie, Paris | August Sander
Jungbauern (Young Farmers), 1914
59 x 43.1 cm; Edition of 18
Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s by Gerd Sander
© Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur –
August Sander Archiv, Köln; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn |
| | | ART COLOGNE 2023 | | | | | | | 16 – 19 November, 2023 | | | Preview: Thursday, 16 November, 12pm – 8pm
Vernissage: Thursday, 16 November, 4 – 8 pm
At this year's edition of Art Cologne, Galerie Julian Sander, Cologne and Galerie Les Douches, Paris, participate with a linked stand architecture and a jointly curated area on the theme of "Nudes in Photography". | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | André Steiner
Untitled, 1932
Vintage gelatin silver print, printed by the artist
24 x 15,5 cm
© Estate André Steiner / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris | Romain Urhausen
Nu, Luxembourg, 2002
Vintage gelatin silver print, printed by the artist
41,5 x 30,5 cm
© Estate Romain Urhausen / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris |
| | | | | | On this occasion, Les Douches la Galerie will present a series of photographs revolving around the representation of the body. Formal, surreal, intimate, deconstructed, the body is a source of inspiration and desire, and an inexhaustible subject.
André Steiner (1901-1978) and Pierre Boucher (1908-2000), photographers from the 1930s, etched into modernity the bodies of swimmers and divers in swimming pools, new locations of relaxation that reveal the body and promote the health-benefits of sport.
While a student at the Bauhaus, Kurt Krantz (1910-1997) sublimated the play of reflections and light in a simple foot bath through a delicate photomontage of direct prints.
With his diver, in 1972, Ernst Haas (1921-1986) composed a genuine ode to colour – becoming one of its precursors – as the journalist Camille Balenieri notes: "In the photograph of the diver in Greece, colour is the true subject. The marine palette presents itself in all its infinite variability – azure, celadon, emerald, aqua and indigo – words are inadequate to describe it, whereas an image, in one instant, reveals all of its nuances."
François Kollar (1904-1979) and Germaine Krull (1897-1985) glorify the hand’s intelligence, highlighting the creations of the period’s great jewellers, while Roger Schall (1904-1995) creates some of the most disturbing photographs through the shadowplay of a hand on the pubis of his famous model Assia.
In the 1980s, the writer, critic and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) documented his private life, focusing in particular on his lovers. Bedrooms and bathrooms are some of the places where the male body is uncovered with great delicacy and in its simple truth.
The painter and surrealist photographer Pierre Molinier (1906-1976) uses his own body, or his model’s body, as the basis for erotic photomontages where legs, genitals and hands multiply in a dance of ecstasy. | | |  | | | Leon Levinstein
Coney Island, 1953
Gelatin silver print mounted on board, printed later
63,5 x 50,7 cm
© Leon Levinstein Estate / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris | | | Leon Levinstein (1913-1988)’s invasive bodies fill the photograph’s frame, block the image and finally disappear, leaving a glimpse of a second scene that the viewer only registers a moment later, when the bodies no longer seem to be seen.
Vivian Maier (1926-2009) breaks up bodies through framing, mirror effects and camera angles that turn a leg or a hand into a simple compositional object.
Finally, through games of construction / deconstruction, Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), the surrealist Val Telberg (1910-1995) and Roger Catherineau (1925-1962) show us that the mere presence of an eye in a composition gives body to people and that even a simple glance can bestow humanity.
Vast, but also little known in France, the photographic works of the artistic pioneer from Luxembourg, Romain Urhausen (1930-2021) are marked by his singular style, a mixture of the French humanist school and the German subjective school of the 1950s and 60s, to which he actively contributed. Often a pretext for formal and poetic exploration, his photographic subjects, tinged with humor, go beyond a classical representation of reality. He brings an experimental, artistic approach to bear on daily life, a man at work, an urban landscape, a nude or a self-portrait.
With a reference to the current exhibition "Roger Ballen: Enigma" at the gallery, a few strong works will be presented. Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950, but since 1982 he has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he is a major artist of the contemporary scene. After studying geology, Ballen got his doctorate in mining economics in 1981 and began working in mineral exploration. It was in 1983, however, armed with his camera, that he began a completely different activity, digging – as he puts it – into the layers of his own inner life and piercing the external surface of a poor and deeply rural country far removed from the clichés of a strong, modern South Africa, to reveal visual and cultural anomalies that were signs of a dying culture. | | | | | |  | | | Chargesheimer
Komposition aus Kreis und Schwarz II, 1950
36.8 x 49.4 cm
Vintage gelatin silver print
Provenance: L.F.Gruber
© Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln | | | At the center of the presentation of Galerie Julian Sander is a curated group of August Sander's famous portraits from "People of the 20th Century". With his epochal project People of the 20th Century, which spanned several decades, August Sander not only set new standards in the portrait photography of his time. With his equally humanistically, sociologically and aesthetically motivated undertaking, he continues to inspire subsequent generations of photographers and artists to this day. The selection on show at Art Cologne consists of large-format photographs that Gerd Sander masterfully reproduced from the original glass negatives in an edition in the 1990s.
Another focus is on works by the Cologne photographer Chargesheimer (1924 - 1972). Born Karl Heinz Hargesheimer, he studied graphics and photography at the Cologne Werkschule and began his career as a freelance photographer for various theaters in Germany. At the center of his photographic oeuvre is "street photography". Mostly in series, they tell the story of street life in his home city of Cologne and other cities. His documentary work includes above all his portraits, which are closely linked to the visual language of theater photography. His portraits are often drastically exaggerated, theatrical and mask-like. Chargesheimer plays with light and shadow as well as light-dark contrasts, creating deep, matte blacks. From 1950 onwards, Chargesheimer experimented with abstract light graphics on photographic paper and surrealistic photomontages. In the 1960s, he created kinetic light sculptures made of movable Plexiglas and steel elements, which he described as "meditation mills". The gallery is delighted to be able to show one of the original kinetic sculptures at Art Cologne.
As an artist, Chargesheimer was a singular figure who consistently refused to follow trends and fashions in art. At the end of the 1940s, he was in contact with the Fotoform group. In 1950, Chargesheimer took part in the "photo-kino" exhibition in Cologne and the legendary "Subjective Photography" exhibitions in 1952 and 1954. He refused to belong to any particular group of artists or movement and saw himself as a loner.
Another central figure in post-war photography and co-founder of the avant-garde photographer group Fotoform is Peter Keetman. He knew how to combine the influence exerted on him by the "New Photographers" of the Weimar era with his own individual perception of the reality around him and to translate it into a new, contemporary aesthetic. During his photographic work, which spanned several decades, he focused on recurring subjects. He was interested in visually appealing phenomena found in nature and the world of things. At Art Cologne, the gallery is showing recently rediscovered vintage prints from Gerd Sander's collection, most of which were acquired from the photographer himself.
These will be complemented by photographs by Adolf Lazi, one of the most important photographers of object and design photography in Germany from the 1950s to the 1960s, whom Keetman assisted for a year in 1948 and further honed his craftsmanship and technical precision. He was also a founding member of the avantgarde photographer group Fotoform and a pioneer of "subjective photography".
With a reference to the current exhibition "Rosalind Fox Solomon - Photographs from the Private Archive" at the gallery, a strong portrait of the artist by William Eggleston will be presented. | | | | | |  | | | Peter Keetman
Untitled (VW-Werk), 1953
23.9 x 33.7 cm
Vintage ferrotyped gelatin silver print on Agfa-Brovira paper
Provenance: Wilhelm Schürmann
© Peter Keetman Archiv/Stiftung F.C. Gundlach | | | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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