calendario eventi  :: 

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29/2/2012

Two Exhibitons

Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

True stories
American photography from the Sammlung Moderne Kunst
Pinakothek der Moderne, Gallery 21

Curated by Dr. Inka Graeve Ingelmann, Sammlung Fotografie und Neue Medien

Robert Adams │John Baldessari | Lewis Baltz │ Larry Clark │ William Eggleston │ Lee Friedlander │ John Gossage │ Dan Graham │ Zoe Leonard │ Nicholas Nixon │ Richard Prince │ Martha Rosler │Judith Joy Ross │ Ed Ruscha │ Stephen Shore │ Garry Winogrand

American photography forms an extensive and simultaneously top-quality focal point in the collection, of which a selected overview is now being exhibited for the first time. The main interest of young photographers, who have been examining changes in political, social and ecological aspects of everyday American life since the late 1960s, has been the American social landscape. They have developed new pictorial styles that define stylistic devices perceived as genuinely American while at the same time being internationally recognised. Whereas Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Larry Clark, who are now considered classical modern photographers, have remained true to black-and-white photography, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore in particular have established colour photography as an artistically independent form of expression. The exhibition brings together around 100 works that, thanks to the Siemens Photography Collection and through acquisitions, bequests and donations, are now part of the museum’s holdings. true stories covers a spectrum from the street photography of the late 1960s to New Topographics and pictures by the New York photographer Zoe Leonard, taken just a few years ago.

'A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their work betrays a sympathy for the imperfection and frailties of society. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it.' With the exhibition New Documents in spring 1967, John Szarkowski, the influential curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, rang in a new era in American photography. Those photographers represented, including Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in addition to Diane Arbus, stood for a change in attitude within documentary photography that was conditioned exclusively by the subjective viewpoint of an individual’s reality. The object of photographic interest lay in the American social landscape and its conditions. It was less concerned with the natural landscape and its increasingly cultural reshaping than with the urban or urbanised space and how people move within it. In so doing, the New Documentarians rejected any obviously explanatory impetus, turning instead to the everyday and commonplace.

The exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape that was staged in the mid 1970s at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, represented a countermovement to this subjective form of expression. Their protagonists, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Stephen Shore, also pleaded for a documentary approach and were influenced by figures such as Walker Evans und Robert Frank, but considered themselves rooted in the tradition of 19th-century topographical photography in particular. The prime initiator of this working method, that was expressly not governed by style, is the Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha. Their central aim is a distanced and seemingly analytical depicition, free of judgement; their topic, the landscape altered by mankind. It is the image of the American West in particular, so much conditioned by myths and dreams but long since brought back to reality as a result of commercial and ecological exploitation, that is visible in their works.

The decisive quantum leap to establishing the position of colour photography was made by the Southerner William Eggleston in his exhibition in 1976, also held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the publication of the William Eggleston’s Guide. The harsh public criticism of his pictures was not to do with his use of colour but the fact that Eggleston photographed things and everyday situations – on the spur of the moment and in a seemingly careless manner – that, until then, had not been considered worthy of being photographed turning them into exquisite prints using the expensive and complicated dye-transfer process. In Eggleston’s cosmos of images that is strongly influenced by motifs and the light of the Mississippi Delta, colour constitutes the picture. The “rush of colour” championed by this exhibition led to the comprehensive implementation of colour photography in the field of artistic photography in the years that followed, starting in the USA and then in Europe – and especially in Germany.

An artistic attitude became established at the end of the 1970s that, with recourse to existing picture material from art, film, advertising and the mass media, formulated new pictorial concepts and, in the same breath, opened up traditional artistic and art-historical categories such as authorship, originality, uniqueness, intellectual property and authenticity to discussion. Appropriation Art owes its decisive influences to the artist John Baldessari, who lives and teaches in California. One of its most famous representatives is Richard Prince, who became famous in particular as a result of his artistic adaptation of advertising images. Concept art in the 1960s and ’70s similarly makes use of photography, both as part of an artistic practice using the most varied of materials and as a unique medium for documenting campaigns, happenings and performances. As works by Dan Graham and Zoe Leonard clearly show, the previously precisely delineated boundaries between photography that alludes to its own intrinsically, media-related history and the use of photography as an artistic strategy, have become more fluid.

A magazine has been published to accompany the exhibition. Price: 16 €

Related film screenings

The screening of related films includes studio discussions with Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Stephen Shore by the photographer and director Michael Engler, recorded in 1982. Selected documentaries on the life and work of John Baldessari (2006, directed by Jan Schmidt-Garre), William Eggleston (2008, directed by Reiner Holzemer) and John Szarkowski (1998, directed by Sandy McLeod ), among others, will be shown in the Ernst von Siemens Auditorium as Sunday matinées on 8, 15 and 22 July, at 11am.

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IN THE SPACE OF THE BEHOLDER
CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE
Contemporary Works from the Sammlung Moderne Kunst

For the viewer, sculpture - with its three-dimensional and material qualities - constitutes a spatial and immediate physical counterpart. It is not seldom that it also conditions the viewer's physical bearing if it needs to be observed from various angles. The way this medium is generally perceived has consequently changed considerably over the past 100 years. It would be inconceivable to think of sculpture today without Marcel Duchamp's readymades or Joseph Beuys' social sculptures.

Mark Manders (*1968), for example, works with everyday materials and objects, some of which are found. His 'Silent Factory", however, seems as if it has evolved from the realm of the subconscious in which any link between the objects and their distinct designation has been capped. Works by other international artists document the broad spectrum of contemporary sculpture that ranges from wall reliefs and assemblages to light and film installations. At the same time, they represent a core field of the collection that has emerged d ring the ten-year history of the Pinankothek der Moderne.

Being sponsored by Ernst & Young


Image: Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, California, 1969, seit 2003 Dauerleihgabe der Siemens AG, München für die Sammlung Moderne Kunst München © Estate of Garry Winogrand

Press Department at the Pinakothek Museums:
Tine Nehler M.A. Head of the Press Dept. Phone.: + 49 89 23805-1321 Fax: + 49 89 23805-125 e-mail: presse@pinakothek.de

Press preview: 01.03.2012, 11.00 a.m.
Opening: 01.03.2012, 7.00 p.m.

Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40 - Munich
Hours: Daily except MON 10.00 a.m. - 6.00 p.m.
TUE 10.00 a.m. - 8.00 p.m.
Closed: Shrove Tuesday, May Day (1 May), Christmas Eve (24 Dec.), Christmas Day (25 Dec.), New Year´s Eve (31 Dec.)
Opened: Twelfth Day (Jan. 6th), Easter Monday, Whit Monday
Admission: 7 euros / reduced 5 euros
Sunday admission 1 euro
Special exhibitions not included.

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