„Waldungen“ ist der Titel einer Serie von 50 Landschaftsaufnahmen, die hier auf ganzseitigen Tafeln abgebildet werden. Sie entstanden während der vergangenen drei Jahre in Oberösterreich, der heimatlichen Region von Bernhard Fuchs in der Nähe von Linz, die er in den 1990erJahren verlassen hatte, um bei Bernd Becher an der Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie zu studieren. Wohl kein anderer Photograph ist heute so weit vom Zeitgeist entfernt wie Bernhard Fuchs. In ihrer Ruhe und Friedlichkeit, in ihrer Geduld und Verschwiegenheit sind seine Bilder schön wie die Natur selbst.
For many years, Ian McKeever has undertaken extensive walks all over the world. His experiences are reflected in his artistic imagination.Vastness, light and a complex experience of space are the structural parameters with which his pictures can be understood. However, he limits himself to only a few colours: white, black, grey, red and blue. His painting is mainly in large formats and captures experiences of landscape in a mediated way.Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ian McKeever: Hartgrove. Paintings and Photographs at Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, 3 June – 2 September 2012.English and German text.
From the outset, the paintings of Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) were from the start defined by clear, geometric forms. An encounter with Josef Albers in the late 1930s greatly influenced Reinhardt's subsequent approach to color, and the two artists maintained a lifelong respect for one another's work (in 1952 Albers offered Reinhardt a guest professorship at Yale, where he was then teaching). The sympathies between their arts lie in the extremity of their geometric reductions, which Reinhardt eventually also applied to color by reducing it to minutely differentiated squares of black on a five-square-foot canvas; but both Albers and Reinhardt envision painting as an art of geometric combinations of color. Reinhardt's statement that his black paintings were "the last paintings anyone can make" betrays his debt to Albers, for his works do indeed seem to conclude the investigations opened by Albers' Homage to the Square series. This volume surveys their affinities.
Die Ausstellung 'Letzte Bilder' zeigt nicht nur selten präsentierte Werke von Ad Reinhardt, sondern geht auch auf die Begegnung zwischen ihm und Josef Albers im Jahr 1952/53 ein. Dabei entwickelte sich zwischen beiden Künstlern ein Gespräch über die Bedeutung der Farbe im malerischen Prozess, insbesondere wenn es darum geht, mit chromatisch eng beieinander liegenden Farben eine visuelle Dynamik zu erreichen. Für Reinhardt war dieser Kontakt mit dem älteren Josef Albers offensichtlich ein wichtiger Impuls auf seinem Weg hin zu den 'schwarzen' Bildern. So werden in dieser Ausstellung die Bilder von Reinhardt durch einige Werke von Albers ergänzt. Exhibition: Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop (26.9.2010-9.1.2011).
Straßen und Wege ist der Titel einer Serie von 53 Landschaftsaufnahmen, die hier auf ganzseitigen Tafeln abgebildet werden. Sie entstanden während der vergangenen fünf Jahre in Oberösterreich, der heimatlichen Region von Bernhard Fuchs in der Nähe von Linz, die er in den 1990erJahren verlassen hatte, um bei Bernd Becher an der Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie zu studieren. Wohl kein anderer Fotograf ist heute so weit vom Zeitgeist entfernt wie Bernhard Fuchs. In ihrer Ruhe und Friedlichkeit, in ihrer Geduld und Verschwiegenheit sind seine Bilder schön wie die Natur selbst.
This collection of quiet, intense black-and-white portraits contains three groups of photographs of American citizens in relation to U.S. war missions during the past 30 years. The most recent pictures present people who demonstrated in 2006 or 2007 against American involvement in the current Iraq war. They are accompanied by shots, made more than 15 years earlier, of soldiers who were just about to leave for their initial deployment in the first Gulf War. The third series, spanning from 1983 to 1984, was made at the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It presents individual portraits of visitors paying tribute to the victims of war in Southeast Asia. None of the close-up shots gathered here conveys allegiance to any particular political orientation. Each simply expresses the irreplaceability of the individual and the importance of honoring his or her memory as the most basic form of humanity. In his catalogue essay, Heinz Liesbrock writes, "Her black-and-white photographs concentrate entirely on the human physiognomy in order to reveal the subjects' inner reality. The pictures dispense with all topical attributes which would make it possible to read an external context, such as profession, social position or any kind of concrete contextual intention, into them. We are therefore in a certain sense left alone with these pictures."
Born in Missouri in 1927, Bishop has lived in Paris since the 1950s. One of the most sensitive lyrical abstract painters, he has devoted the last three decades to small paper works that are transparent, compact, fluid and spatially ambiguous. Herein, works on paper since the 1960s and several paintings.
Joachim Brohm Bwas' "Ruhr" documents the industrial decline of the West German valley from which it takes its name--an area that was once home to Germany's coal mining and steel production centers, as well as other heavy and light manufacturing, and later became famous for its high degree of air pollution. This work, made between the late 1970s and the mid-80s, made Brohm one of the first German photographers to engage with the issues raised by American landscape photography--both that of the nineteenth century and the topographical work being done from 1970 onwards--and to transport it into the European context in which it has since thrived. "Ruhr" is an integral link between U.S. and European photography, whose significance is confirmed with its first complete publication here.
