Author: Christiane Wunsch
Art Basel Review
Exhibition: October 5 – November 30, 2021
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
All artworks are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send an email to: contact@danielblau.com
Paris Photo 2021
DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present four special exhibitions at Paris Photo 2021, covering three centuries of photographic history.
Dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century, our earliest items were created by photographic pioneer Louis Alphonse Poitevin, a man whose life’s work enriched both the artistic and the technological development of the young art form. Through years of chemical experimentation he devised a procedure allowing him to print and distribute his images in mass‑market books. Having grasped the potential of photographic images as a form of mass media at a very early stage in the history of photography, Poitevin finds himself spoken of today alongside his colleagues Daguerre and Niépce, one of the “troisième homme de la photographie”.
The outstanding examples of his work that Daniel Blau is presenting at Paris Photo are noteworthy for their technical mastery within their historical context, their remarkable attention to detail, and their pure artistic value.
A catalogue of Alphonse Poitevin’s works is being published to accompany this exhibition.
A group of rare color and black and white silver gelatin prints from the NASA space missions Voyager, Mariner and Surveyor from the 1960s and ‘70s comprises our second exhibition for this year. Visitors familiar with our programme will be excited to fi nd an impressive new set of extraterrestrial images, formerly part of the collection of David Hasdell, presented now to the public at Paris Photo 2021.
The third exhibition we will be presenting at Paris Photo 2021 is a collection of rare photographs focusing on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. These images speak to one of the most devastating military decisions in history, from both a Japanese and an American perspective. Yosuke Yamahata’s photographs of August 9, 1945
offer us a unique fi rsthand insight into a city’s total destruction, and the fate of the men and women who lived through it. This exhibition is also being accompanied by a publication.
A true highlight of our offerings this year is twin set of contemporary photographs from Blau Gallery’s own Sofia Valiente, the winner of Daniel Blau’s young photographers 5 Under 30 competition in 2015. Her projects “Miracle Village” and “Foreverglades” are accompanied by photo books available at our booth. For “Miracle Village,” the artist lived among registered sex offenders in a rural Florida community. Her report from that time includes photographs
and handwritten testimonies from the residents. “Foreverglades” brings stories from the Florida Everglades and the state’s pioneer past to new light. Sofia’s work has been featured in publications including Time, The Guardian, El Mundo, Vice and American Photo Magazine, and has been exhibited in London, New York and Paris. In 2015, she received the World Press Photo award for “Miracle Village” (1st prize, portraits, stories), the South Florida Cultural Consortium Artist Fellowship, and Burn Magazine’s Young Talent Award. “Miracle Village” and “Foreverglades” are also accompanied by a booklet.
NEW LOCATION !!
PARIS PHOTO
Grand Palais Ephemere
Champs de Mars
75007 Paris
Fair Dates:
Vernissage:
Wednesday,
November 10, 2021
11 pm – 9 pm
Public Opening:
Thursday,
November 11 – 14, 2021
Opening Hours:
Daily: 12 am to 8 pm
Blau Bulletin #1
Many galleries are defined by the world around them, the circumstances they find themselves surrounded by. An environment rich in artistic creation might be the essential factor – consider London in the ‘80s and ‘90s, for instance. Lucio Amelio – already at this point deathly ill – put it to me this way: “A gallery is one head.” Well then, the gallery reflects my interests, and my interests are manifold.
Until January 2020, the rhythms of trade fair and exhibition dictated how decisions were made in our field – what commercial themes needed foregrounding, when publishing literature on those topics made the most sense. Many subjects close to my own heart have been put on hold for decades due to simple lack of time; it took a dozen years to do justice to Poitevin. The project I envisioned seemed too complex and commercially unviable.
When my dealings with 19th century photography first began intensifying, what astonished me perhaps more than anything was – in comparison to contemporary art – how low the monetary value assigned to it was. Only few photographs commanded a genuinely high price, and the stock was treated accordingly – some were even priced by weight! When the selection is as large as it is, it can be difficult for an avid collector to concentrate. And when one already has all the possibilities of collection in general in mind, the field of possibilities and interest areas becomes truly immeasurable. And everywhere is something to discover.
Once the government-imposed restrictions of 2020 interrupted the cycle of fair and exhibition, and it became clear that there would be no opportunity of live, public presentation and interaction for any of us, we began searching for the necessary alternatives. I myself felt a desire to better understand and more clearly delineate our program – that is to say, the direction of the gallery at large. The result was our emailed bulletin of the last year. Each issue has begun with a single topic, which it expands upon and explores.
Here, our intention is above all to spark and develop interest among the ‘younger’ generations. Ours is a moment of rampant superficiality and weak concentration; we hope to raise the curtain a little, to expose the endless possibilities of the artistic gaze. If only one or two young people find a fire awoken in them through our little pandemic-year project, that alone will have made this a success.
Photographs and drawings are obvious partners for the digital medium of the computer and internet. My own personal interests have always been widely strewn, and not always easily translated into the context and requirements of a gallery space, even if only from a purely commercial perspective. Nevertheless I have always sought to infect others with these passions. Our bulletin has proven remarkably well-suited, as a format, for this purpose.
We invite you to to take a little stroll with us now, through our gallery’s program and far beyond, to find inspiration and new perspectives in things great and small. It is a vast field of artistry before us, and we look forward to exploring it with you.
Editor:
Daniel Blau
Maximilianstr. 26
80539 Munich
ISBN: 978-3-7774-3747-7
Limited Edition of 3000
Published 2021
Copyright: this publication © Daniel Blau, Munich
Text: Katharina Rohmeder, Carrie Foulkes
Layout: Christiane Wunsch
Editing/Translation: Robert Isaf
Order your copy exclusivly here: contact@danielblau.com
Art Basel 2021
DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present an exhibition of modern and contemporary work by renowned international artists at Art Basel 2021. The show encompasses multiple media, from works on paper to oil paintings on canvas and stained-glass compositions.
Among the highlights is a selection of ink line drawings by Andy Warhol (1928-1987), presented here in stunning antique frames. His exceptional draughtsmanship and interest in the human form is visible in these early works from the ‘50s. Warhol’s drawings have been the focus of ever-growing attention in recent years, receiving widespread acclaim after a number of high-profile museum exhibitions, and we are pleased to bring them now to our Art Basel audience.
A number of contemporary artists, including Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934), Markus Lüpertz (b. 1941) and Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), will be exhibited through DANIEL BLAU as well. We are excited to be the first gallery to present a Bengston painting at Art Basel: his large, boldly colored 1981 Malu Draculas. It is a piece highly typical of Bengston, whose vivid watercolour and paper collages evoke the warm Pacific landscapes of his home, of the Californian and Hawai’ian earth, ocean, and sky he lives and works among.
The discovery of the “Dithyramb” – a term from the poetics of the antique world, originally denoting a form of song in praise of Dionysus, god of wine, and which has come in common parlance to describe an attitude of exuberance towards life, of a passionate ‘inspiration’ and ‘drunkenness’ – marks the beginning of Markus Lüpertz’s painting career. His thick brushstrokes lash out at the viewer from the large, two-meter canvas in the striking example exhibited here, Weintraube (Dithyrambisch), granting his subject – an otherwise ordinary bunch of grapes – a truly monumental quality.
Baselitz’s hand is immediately recognisable for the swift, confident strokes that characterise all of his work, from sculptures and paintings to more intimate paper-based art. On exhibition will be a first state proof (from an edition consisting of nine diverse prints) of one of his first, gigantic linocuts. Here, as in countless other works, the artist’s wife, Elke, acts as his subject and muse.
Also on display are two stained-glass windows by Neal Fox (b. 1981), whose colorful and highly detailed work takes a special delight in the musical and countercultural universes it references and asks us to revel in too.
A rare example from Kirkeby’s transitional period, a boldly painted eagle head referencing American Pop and Abstract Expressionist artists like Rauschenberg.
Eugène Leroy is a much-overlooked master of texture and light on canvas.
ar. Penck is present in one of his rare early canvases which at the time had to be smuggled out of East Germany – by unstretching them and folding them to fit in the trunk of a car to be exhibited on the western side of the iron curtain.
Fair Dates:
Vernissage:
September 20 – 23, 2021
11 am – 8 pm
Public Days:
September 24 – 26, 2021
11 am – 7 pm
Booth F10
Messeplatz 10
4005 Basel
It sparkles and shines; it absorbs light, and it casts light back with a unique, effusive clarity. Water is omnipresent.
Wasserspiele
It sparkles and shines; it absorbs light, and it casts light back with a unique, effusive clarity. Water is omnipresent. On a planetary scale it overwhelms us – it fills our oceans, weighs down the air around, wears the earth beneath our feet down and away into plunging gorges and vast canyons, and coats that earth again in crystal ivory when the air and earth turn frozen. On the microscopic scale it finds its way everywhere, dissolving and diluting, breaking nutrients down and conducting them onwards to feed the cells of plants and animals.
This elemental blend of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen serves as home for countless species of organisms, ranging from the largest to the smallest forms of life on the planet. Because water can hold and carry things both living and lifeless, its purity varies dramatically, along with its best possible uses from one source to another.
Evaporation of water acts a magic cleanser, leaving solid impurities behind as the pure moisture is drawn into the skies, re-gathered in clouds and re-distributed across earth and ocean with the help of global air currents and crashing storms. Water’s immense power is central to local, national, and international political scuffles and decision-making processes. It has molded and will only continue to mold geography both physical and political, and, with it, the history of human life. Social systems and customs are intimately bound up with the availability of water, and there is no economy on earth that does not leverage its value or suffer from its scarcity. The physical record of water’s changing impact over the centuries and millennia often are found concealed underwater, in soil, jungles, and caves, luring anthropologists, just as journalists and storytellers are drawn to the fascinations of fire, flood, and hurricane, and the opportunity to weave new tales from the devastation and prosperity water can bring. Its influence in language, music, art, theater, and ritual ceremony and custom is nearly endless – think of Sumidagawa in classical Noh theater, of the rain dances of indigenous cultures worldwide, of Moby Dick or Rusalka (or The Little Mermaid!).
Water is the fundamental shapeshifter. It reflects color, catches light, flows, and freezes. Even as it turns predator to the unwary, it becomes artistic prey for photographers, filmmakers, and painters, seeking to capture the fleeting, spellbinding truths it contains, casts back, and carries away.
Text adapted from: https://magazine.libarts.colostate.edu/article/water-as-science-and-art/
All photographs are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send an email to: contact@danielblau.com
All offers are noncommital. We cannot guarantee the items are still available on request.
Other Diversions
Franz Schubert - Gesang der Geister über den Wassern Article 'Aqua Depicta' Fallingwater M.A. Thesis 'The Ocean in Moby Dick' Water Encyclopedia NASA Blue Marble Collection Ocean Waves Sounds Handel - Watermusic Trick Fountains Hellabrunn Turner's Sketchbooks, Drawings, Watercolors
3 under 30
Daniel Blau is pleased to announce the winners of 3 Under 30, the gallery’s competition for young photographers.
- Jimmy Chin Kiu Lee
- Sarah Louise Lordan
- Manon Martsch
The gallery received numerous submissions from emerging artists around the world. The winning photographers were selected based on the strengths of their portfolio and accompanying statement.
We will present a selection of works by these talented photographers at a group exhibition in Paris during Photo Saint Germain November 2021.
We wish to congratulate these photographers and we look forward to working with them on the Paris project.
Digital technology has made the process of altering photographs faster and easier, more difficult to detect, and more accessible to more people – many more people – than at any point in history.
The Art of Airbrush
“I do not understand why this is supposed to interfere with the truth. … Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried.”
(Bill Brandt, “A Statement,” (1970), in: Bill Brandt: Selected Texts and Bibliography,
ed. Nigel Warburton (Oxford: Clio Press, 1993), p. 31.)
Digital technology has made the process of altering photographs faster and easier, more difficult to detect, and more accessible to more people – many more people – than at any point in history. Its beginnings, though, stretch back far further than the late twentieth century and the advent of digital photography. Though the technology may be new, the desire to modify camera-captured images is as old as photography itself, and the determination of artists and inventors through the generations has brought new techniques and innovations at every step. Nearly every kind of photographic manipulation we now associate with Photoshop was once part of photography’s analog repertoire, from slimming waistlines and smoothing away wrinkles to replacing backgrounds and adding people to group shots (or, in other cases – removing them!). From the earliest days of photography onward, photographers have devised a staggering array of techniques, including multiple exposure, photomontage, combination printing, airbrush retouching, and more.
(Adapted from: Mia Fineman, Faking it. Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2012), p. 5-6.)
Winston Smith, protagonist of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and civil servant in Oceania, the totalitarian superstate ruled by ‘the Party’ works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where he spends his days ‘rectifying’ historical documents to accord with the Party’s latest version of reality – falsifying the past to square it with the ideological needs of the present. One day, while rewriting a newspaper report concerning a speech by Big Brother, he invents a fictious war hero, Comrade Ogilvy, whose death the rectified speech will commemorate. “It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy,” Winston reflects, “but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence. […] Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne and Julius Caesar.“
(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), quoted in Mia Fineman, Faking it. Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2012), p. 89.)
When Orwell was writing, in the late 1940s, the Stalinist project of historical revisionism was in full swing in the Soviet Union, and the faking of photographs was a key tactic in the regime’s systematic falsification of the past. A manipulated photograph could endow political fiction with an air of factual authenticity. The falsification of photographs was widespread in the Soviet Union, but it was hardly unique to that country or that political system. The temptation to ‘rectify’ photographic documents has proved irresistible to modern demagogues of all stripes, from Adolf Hitler to Mao Zedong to Joseph McCarthy.
In a relatively benign example discovered among the files of Hitler’s official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is excised from a publicity photograph taken at the Berlin home of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in 1937, possibly in order to combat rumors that Goebbels and Riefenstahl were having an affair.
(Adapted from: Mia Fineman, Faking it. Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2012), p. 89-90.)
Airbrush:
Tool that combines a liquid medium with air and forces it through a tiny orifice to produce a fine mist for smooth application of the medium to a substrate. First patented by the American Francis E. Stanley in 1876 and used for coloring and coating photographs as well as for retouching, the airbrush was a precursor to aerosol spray paint.
(Adapted from: Mia Fineman, Faking it. Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2012), p. 270.)
All photographs are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send an email to: contact@danielblau.com
All offers are noncommital. We cannot guarantee the items are still available on request.
Other Diversions
PhD Thesis on Airbrushing Airbrushinfo.net Blau Bulletin #1 (Retouching in Photography) Airbrushed From History (Article The Independent) How Politicians Are Retouching Their Photos Artists Working With Airbrush Barrie Cook (The Guardian) Digital Retouching of Skin with Airbrush
Wasserspiele
Exhibition: July 29 – September 7, 2021 | extended until September 30, 2021
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
All artworks are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send an email to: contact@danielblau.com
We associate green with Spring, with new birth and rebirth and plants as they sprout and grow.
Green
We associate green with Spring, with new birth and rebirth and plants as they sprout and grow. As the color of yearly renewal and of the triumph of spring over cold winter, green symbolizes hope and immortality. The very root of the word in German – ‘grün’ – lies in the old Germanic ‘ghro,’ whose meaning is fundamentally to grow and to thrive.
Nor, for that matter, is the relationship between the English words ‘grow’ and ‘green’ a coincidence. With the help of sunlight and carbon dioxide, which man and animal alike expel in breathing, the plants of the world are able to produce starch and the oxygen so necessary for our own life.
The magic ingredient in photosynthesis is the green pigment chlorophyll, which possesses the ability to transform inorganic substances into organic ones.
In ancient Egypt, the color green carried, along with blue, primarily positive connotations. The ancient Egyptian goddess of the sky (and of cows), Hathor, was portrayed on occasion in the form of a green tree. She was taken to be mistress of both love and life. Green malachite was of particular importance. The stone would be ground down and mixed with egg white, acacia resin, or fig sap to create emerald paints, used for instance by Egyptian women as eyeshadow. Along with its use as a pigment, it was, and remains today, a highly prized gemstone. The Egyptians mined the mineral on Mount Sinai, extracting copper from the ore. In the Arab world, pulverized malachite was taken as an antidote to poisons and to counter ulcers. The same was true of the gemstone emerald.
Green, in the Middle Ages, was the color of love, but not of love alone: evil serpents and demons were increasingly portrayed clad in or surrounded by green as well. In ancient China, dragons still possessed very positive meanings. They symbolized the divine power of transformation, the rhythm of nature, as well as supernatural wisdom and strength. In each instance, the positive symbolism of the dragon and the color green went hand-in-hand.
Christianity took the positive symbol of the dragon and turned it on its head, creating a monster from it, one that combined everything evil and destructive in it. The skin of Christian demons was colored green, like their eyes, and far from being bridges to divine wisdom they led their victims directly to hell.
Fertility’s association with the color green became a mark of shame as the guardians of Christian morality sought to avoid every hint of excessive sexuality. The Devil – in his style as hunter of souls – appeared in green clothing. Although many artists of the Middle Ages had painted Christ upon a green cross, and many saints in their paintings wore green themselves, as a symbol of hope, the idea that green and gold together indicate poison existed then and has endured to the present day. This association was so strong that it led to the term ‘venom-‘ or ‘poison-green.’
A truly poisonous ‘venom-green’ green actually does exist, though only since 1805, when chemists in the German city of Schweinfurt sought to create a paint more deep-green than what existed at the time. Its recipe calls for verdigris and arsenic acid. After application to, for instance, the walls of a room, moisture can still interact with the paint, resulting in a chemical reaction that produces toxic fumes of arsenic compounds. In German it is still called ‘Schweinfurt green’; ‘Paris green’ is the more common name in English, due to its later application as rat poison in Parisian sewers. Napoleon had a particular affection for the color green. The walls of his exilic room on St. Helena were painted in Paris green. When Italian chemists of our own century, a team from the University of Milano-Biocca, conducted a chemical analysis of Napoleon’s hair, they found elevated concentrations of arsenic in it. Theories erupted following the results’ publication, claiming that Napoleon died from arsenic poisoning. Following a more recent and more precise examination by the Milanese professor Ettore Fiorini, arsenic was determined not to have been the cause of Napoleon’s death. Evidently, the emperor had died of a stomach tumor.
Sources/Further Reading:
Adapted from: Thomas Seilnacht, “Naturwissenschaften unterrichten. Didaktik der Naturwissenschaft”, online: Sailnacht, “Phänomen Farbe. Grün”: Lexikon Grün
Robertson, D. W. “Why the Devil Wears Green.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 69, no. 7, 1954, pp. 470–472. JSTOR, JSTOR
Hutchings, John. “Folklore and Symbolism of Green.” Folklore, vol. 108, 1997, pp. 55–63. JSTOR,
Dorothee Fauth, “Kunstlexikon. Porträt,” June 2, 2005, for Hatje Cantz online:
JSTOR
All photographs are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send an email to: contact@danielblau.com
All offers are noncommital. We cannot guarantee the items are still available on request.
Other Diversions
Study 'Colors, Emotions, and the Auction Value of Paintings' R.E.M. Green Album (1988) Playlist Sing along 'Grün, grün, grün sind alle meine Kleider' Sing along '10 Green Bottles' Noteworthy Greens Guiseppe Verdi at the Met Verdi's 'Rigoletto' (full movie) 1982 starring Luciano Pavarotti Asteroid 'Green' Attenborough's Paradise Birds - BBC
31 x 23 cm, © John Lurie, courtesy Daniel Blau, Munich
[RE] GENERATION
2 Space Pop-up Art Show
Opening July 2nd at 4 pm
at
Knust Kunz
Ludwigstraße 7
80539 Munich
mail@sabineknust.com
www.sabineknust.com
+49 (0) 89 29160703
from July 2nd until July 7, 2021
Daniel Blau
Maximilianstraße 26
80539 Munich
contact@danielblau.com
www.danielblau.com
+49 (0) 89 297342
from July 2nd until July 16, 2021
Proceeds from the exhibition will go to support the creation of the frst physical [Re]generator, hopefully in Kamikatsu, Japan. Kamikatsu is known as Japan’s “zero waste town”. The hope is that such a space, will serve as a model to other towns around the world, to adopt similar approaches to local ecological and social challenges. The “creative citizen’s assembly” problem-solving model applies new insights from deliberative democratic practice emerging around the world. Through this creative space, it is hoped that new creative engagements, reciprocities and ecologies between humans and their environment can emerge. In this way, the [Re]generator could inspire a new circular ecology of regenerative art and artistic regeneration.
The organisers of [RE] GENERATION believe that social, political and ecological healing, must begin with the imagination. By bringing a diversity of dynamic creative perspectives into one space, we wish to inspire the public to join us on a journey of discovering alternative visions of the possibilities for life on our green Earth. The exhibition has been curated with the help of Valeria Diaz Granada.
From July 2nd, 2021, two of the artists in [RE] GENERATION, China Marks and Chris Bianchi, will also be exhibiting in a parallel two-person show, BONKERZ GARDEN, at KNUSTxKUNZ+ on Theresienstrasse 48.
Online Showroom
Link launching on Opening Day July 2nd
Participating Artists:
• Amanda Lees
• August Alexander
• China Marks • www.chinamarks.net
• Chris Bianchi • www.chrisbianchi.co.uk
• Clara • www.vimeo.com/secretsbyclara
• David Sater • www.davidsater.net
• Duy Hoàng • www.duy-h.com
• Ella Belenky • www.ellabelenky.com
• Hans Kern • www.swarming.global
• Lara Schnitger • www.antonkerngallery.com/artists/lara_schnitger
• Neal Fox • www.nealfox.co.uk
• Robert Rubbish • www.robertrubbish.blogspot.com
• Satch Hoyt • www.satchhoyt.art
• Steph von Reiswitz • www.stephvonreiswitz.com
• Thad Higa • www.thadhiga.com
• Victorin Ripert • www.victorinripert.tumblr.com
• LE GUN collective (Neal Fox, Robert Rubbish, Steph von Reiswitz • www.legun.co.uk)
+49 89 29 73 42