Landscape in Flux

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition – Landscape in Flux, featuring the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joachim Brohm, Heinrich Riebesehl, Wilhelm Schürmann, and Michael Schmidt. Curated by Chris Balaschak, this exhibition focuses on a key period of photography dating from 1976 to 1981, highlighting a point of change in the aesthetics of German photography. In this moment these photographers began to concentrate on quotidian subjects and capture them in an objective manner. Though today, in the United States, we associate this aesthetic with the likes of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and others arising out of the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the early 1980s, there were a number of photographers highly influential on this younger generation but are unrecognized (with some exceptions) outside Continental Europe. Landscape in Flux exhibits the work of five photographers who were key in changing the way we view a landscape that was itself changing, and it is through them that we can assess the history of contemporary photography and how it is has shifted our view of the landscape we inhabit.

The historical core of “Landscape in Flux” is around the period of Klaus Honnef’s 1979 exhibition “In Deutschland.” Broadening the focus to a period between 1976 and 1981 “Landscape in Flux,” in reference Honnef’s exhibition, exhibits work by a then emerging group of photographers capturing a new landscape forming across Germany. The earliest work in the show is by Bernd and Hilla Becher from the mid-1960s, which presents the object-driven method they had well established by the late 1970s (when they taught their now notorious progeny). From Heinrich Riebesehl’s long career the curator has gathered works from 1978 specifically, when his innovative “Agrarlandschaften” series documented the agrarian landscape, yet with an occasional suburban construct or roadway entering in at the edges. Also dating from 1978 are Wilhelm Schürmann’s photographs of the Belgium town Liege (just across the German border), a town of new construction mixed with old, industrial streets. Schürmann and Riebesehl’s works perform the task of marking that point when the new order of a homogenized, global, (sub)urban culture begins to overtake the long established agricultural and industrial based landscape of the West. This change is also felt in viewing Michael Schmidt’s “Berlin-Wedding,” presented here in its published, book form, discovering the city (Berlin) where the old and the new once met in the harshest of terms. The overall objective aesthetic typified by these photographers, often coming across through everyday subjects, finds its colorful, vernacular form in the work of Joachim Brohm. Brohm’s work, strongly influential on Andreas Gursky, is the earliest color work in Germany to document this new landscape. His photographs of leisure time and peripheral spaces help us to place ourselves within this landscape.

The photographers of “Landscape in Flux” all emerge in a period often overlooked outside of Continental Europe. Influenced by American photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Stephen Shore, this group of German photographers was important in shifting photographic concepts into the form we now recognize as contemporary photography. The photographers in “Landscape in Flux” can be recognized as the originators of a crisp, conceptual focus on the present-day landscape we, in the West, inhabit.

Pressetext

Landscape in Flux
Kurator: Chris Balaschak

mit Bernd und Hilla Becher, Joachim Brohm, Heinrich Riebesehl, Wilhelm Schürmann, Michael Schmidt