"Trace" is the name of the current exhibition in Munich's Haus der Kunst.
Photographic art and video works collected by The Walther Collection will be on display.
The works come mainly from Africa and Asia.
This guest brings a lot of excitement: The Walther Collection is making a stop at the Haus der Kunst in Munich with its photographs and video works.
And if you want to know how energetic this visit to the art foundation with its offices in New York and Neu-Ulm is, you can get an idea of it right away in the first room.
Because here you can almost physically feel the forces that are affecting the “Trace” show.
It pulls and pulls, wants to get away from each other - and yet belongs together.
Absolutely.
The Walther Collection is based in New York and Neu-Ulm
At the beginning, curator Anna Schneider and her colleague Hanns Lennart Wiesner placed photographic works by Karl Blossfeldt next to a wall with amateur photographs from Japan – thereby creating an enormous field of energy.
On the left are the impressive, formally strictly designed and documentary-precise detailed photographs of plants created by Blossfeldt (1865-1932), this resourceful inventor and lovable botany freak: Among them are some plants that are almost extinct today, i.e. those for mankind are almost lost.
"Trace" in the Haus der Kunst broadens the perspective
"Lost and Found" is the title of the project on the right wall that Munemasa Takahashi launched after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011: More than 1,000 volunteers collected around 750,000 private photos in the rubble in Miyagi Prefecture, digitized – and the owners of around 400,000 found.
Snapshots, of high personal and no artistic value, many bear traces of the destruction caused by the natural catastrophe, so they meet enormously artificial, staged plant portraits, prime examples of New Objectivity.
This play of energies runs through the entire exhibition, aesthetically, in terms of content and design.
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Arranged thematically, here the room “Intimacies – personal experiments”.
© Maximilian Geuter/House of Art
Anyone interested in photographic art probably knows Blossfeldt, knows Bernd and Hilla Becher, Richard Avedon, August Sander, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth or Ai Weiwei.
However, The Walther Collection does not collect names, but rather cultural areas that do not belong to the Central European "who's who", especially works from Africa and Asia.
"We tell stories that have not been told in the past and bring them together with our stories," says the founder of the foundation, Artur Walther, explaining the approach and claim.
So the title of the exhibition is justified: the "track" that this show traces leads around the world and shows images of our world.
The starting point of the exhibition "Trace" is portrait photography
The starting point is the human portrait to which the main hall is dedicated.
Based on this, further works are arranged into more or less expected thematic complexes;
it's about questions of identity and intimacy, about human intervention in the environment, nature and society.
A discovery are the works of Em'kal Eyongakpa, who, through long exposure, takes his (landscape) shots far removed from the documentary and gives them enormous plasticity.
Another highlight are the black and white films by Yang Fudong, which come across as harmless but tell of the end of the world.
This show wants and shows a lot: photo and video art, amateur recordings, commercial photography from the middle of the 19th century to the present day.
Luckily, the curators don't overload anything, but continue the moment of tension from the beginning not only in terms of content, but also in the presentation.
The hanging is sometimes wonderfully airy, shortly afterwards then enormously concentrated.
"What we did," says Artur Walther, "is a bit groundbreaking." However, you can also put it a little less broadly: "Trace" broadens the perspective.
Exhibition information:
Until July 23, 2023;
Wed.-Mon.
10 a.m.-8 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-10 p.m.
