English
Deutsch
until 09.06. | #1178ARTatBerlin | Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST presents from first March 2017 the group exhibition “LIEBLINGSBILDER”.
Love loves small things. Love doesn’t seek big pathos or emphasis. Love hides in the profane; in the shiny shoes in which one has journeyed or in the perfect fold of a beautiful dress. The really big things often lurk in the smallest of details. “I believe,” the American poet Walt Whitman once wrote, “a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.” It is a poetry of dignity and nuance. This is a credo about the interplay of all things and the reverberation of the mighty cosmos in the allegedly banal everyday life.
These unique “leaves of grass” are exactly what Johanna Breede has selected for her exhibit Favorite Images: French photographer Isa Marcelli captures the red painted mouth of her daughter, dreamily in the summer sun; or the deep insight caught by the Stuttgart photographer, Hannes Killian, in 1955 at an afternoon tea dance ceremony. These gestures, ornamentations and signs don’t reveal for certain the profound secret of life, but together they show life’s preciousness, its small fortunes and its grace present in the simplest of things.
Favorite Images is a selection of over 40 black and white photographs from the 1930s to the present. It is perhaps the most personal exhibition that Johanna Breede has ever mounted in her gallery on Berlin’s Fasanenstraße. The show combines images from the great photographers with whom she has had the honor to collaborate over the past ten years in her profession as an gallerist: works by the photographers Barbara Klemm and Nomi Baumgartl and from the estates of Herbert List, Max Scheler and Liselotte Strelow; treasures from the oeuvre of a total of 28 artists. These are not the iconic images. These are the images that represent what Johanna Breede’s gallery has always been about, namely, classic, vintage photography, non-mainstream and always with a very specific, uncommon photographic eye.
For example, the Swiss travel and portrait photographer, Beat Presser, made famous in the 70s by his inimitable portraits of Klaus Kinski, is represented with an unusual image of the eccentric actor’s back – a view of a head without a face, flat hair and a stiff collar. René Groebli created a portrait in a Paris hotel room in 1953, a sensual view of the neck of his young wife Rita. A love poem. A gentle study of her body, seen from the „eye of a lover“. Sheila Rock’s contribution to the exhibition shows nothing less then the reverberation of a human soul, which she discovered in 2002 on the face of a Tibetan monk.
Thomas Hoepker, on the other hand will show work from his travels on the American roadside: billboards and forests of traffic signs, humorous images of profane company logos and signs of western mass consumer society. These images may reveal more about Hoepker’s soul and his choice of America as his home than the colorful glamor of Time Square ever could.
This spring exhibition will also show favorite images chosen by some of the photographers themselves. Images by Donata Wenders and Monique Jacot. These images do not win over with size and obvious, pronounced subject matter, but they, too, celebrate Walt Whitman’s leaves of grass. The most impressive example of this is from Hannes Kilian, the photojournalist who died in 1999. His favorite image reveals, in a closeup, the enormous cosmos in the singularly tiny space of an insect’s wing..
Do we not all immediately think of the theory that with the flap of its wings, the butterfly might cause a storm half a world away? Ultimately, there have always been small things that have turned art and life upside down. Ralf Hanselle
With works by: Peter Beard, Lillian Birnbaum, Dietmar Bührer, René Groebli, Heinz Hajek-Halke, Thomas Hoepker, Monique Jacot, Hannes Kilian, Birgit Kleber, Barbara Klemm, Jens Knigge, Robert Lebeck, Herbert List, Isa Marcelli, Stefan moses, Ulrike Ottinger, Marek Pozniak, Beat Presser, Sheila Rock, Michael Ruetz, Max Scheler, Wolfgang Sievers, Liselotte Strelow, Karin Székessy, Donata Wenders and Kurt Wyss.
Exhibition period: Wednesday, first March to Friday, 9th June 2017
[maxbutton id=”238″ ]
Image caption: © Hannes Kilian ‘MAN TANZT WIEDER!’ 1955
Exhibitions Berlin Galleries: LIEBLINGSBILDER – Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST | ART at Berlin
