Daido Moriyama

DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present an exceptional exhibition of 23 new paintings Japanese artist Daido Moriyama based on photos he took in 1971 in New York City. (b.1938, Osaka, Japan).
 
Over the course of his 60-year long career, the renowned Japanese artist, Moriyama, has documented his immediate surroundings, analyzing the society of post-war Japan along the way. He has significantly changed the way we perceive photography – and even called the very medium into question himself.
 
His diverse œvre is shaped by his many publications and largely comprises traditional photographs, installations and silkscreen prints. With focus on bold contrast, Moriyama’s unmistakeable visual language was influenced by Andy Warhol.
 
Moriyama’s work between 1968 and 1972 is characterized by depth and density, the result of his talent feeding off the cultural pulse of the time. Photography was omnipresent, both in the press and in advertising.
 
These 2023 works in bronze and black are devoted to the themes of mass media, consumer society and everyday life and are based on early photographs taken by the artist in New York City in 1971. Of the city, Moriyama said:
 
“My favourite city: New York. I have no doubt that I like it even more than Tokyo. Somewhere hidden in it is a strange kindness and sadness, Sometimes when I want to remember the person I love, I think of the lights of New York. Since I’m afraid to travel by plane, it’s a great pity that even if I wanted to, I can’t just fly there right now.“
 
During his time there, Moriyama manipulated his camera such that each negative image could take two single exposures, each half the size of a regular 35mm negative. Now, these pairs of images are combined onto single canvases, creating a kind of “multifaceted reality” typical of Moriyama’s style from this period, which embodied the concept of are, bure, bokeh – meaning grainy, blurred and out of focus.

 
 
 
Exhibition Dates:
 
September 5 – October 12, 2023
 
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
 
 

The works in the exhibition are for sale. Please contact us for availability and prices.

 

 
 

Art Basel Review

2023

 

Exhibition: July 18 – August 31, 2023
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All illustrations are available for purchase. Prices upon request.

 

 

 

George Grosz

Drawings 1913 – 1916

 

Exhibition: March 7 – April 18, 2023 ! Extended until June 15, 2023 !
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All illustrations are available for purchase. Prices upon request.

 

 

 

NASA photographs

The unbelievable happened in 1969. A spacecraft crewed by humans touched down on the moon. Even now, the moon landing, and the missions into space that led up to and succeeded it, retain their fascination for us. A curation of high-quality images, both in color and in black-and-white, are presented here as kaleidoscopic insight into the NASA missions of the late 1960s and ‘70s they document. It could be that even the photo-enthusiast public sees little special, today, in space photography, overwhelmed as it is by countless satellites sending back high-resolution glimpses into the cosmos.
If we cast our thoughts back some 60 years, though, NASA’s photographs appear again in new light: the surface of the moon recorded by man, the earth photographed for the first time from that lunar surface, heavily historic and phenomenal images. From a scientific perspective, of course, these missions, of an era already receding into memory, gained mankind a wealth of new information and ways of understanding the universe around us. The stillness, though, the endless quiet of these photographs, the play of light and shadow on another world and beyond our ken, the colors glistening off the horizons of other planets and into boundless space – these are artworks, pure, and fascinating moments in the history of photography.

 

Exhibition: January 10 – February 23, 2023
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request.

 

 

 

Hortus Magicus

Hortus Magicus, the new studio exhibition from DANIEL BLAU, is devoted to one of artistic photography’s first true genres: landscape. From some of the earliest, often anonymous photographic studies, though monumental 20th-century travel scenes, to the famous flower Polaroids of Araki, Hortus Magicus brings together twenty-three outstanding photographic witnesses to the magic of nature and the enchanting simplicity of a lens turned to the unbuilt world.
 
Emerging trends and tendencies in art photography of the mid-nineteenth century encouraged an exploration of and head-on engagement with new themes. The depiction of nature and landscape had, up until this point, remained largely reserved for the painter, but increased involvement with and interest in the world beyond ever-more industrializing cities opened a place among the arts that photography was perfectly positioned to fill. “Barbizon Tree Study,” by Charles Bodmer, illustrates this shift perfectly: the most essential elements of its design show a direct line and relationship back to techniques of landscape painting, to the immediate engagement with nature that define the teachings of the Barbizon school.
 
Especially impressive as testimonies to the mid-nineteenth century’s drive towards discovery are the two photographs that compromise Felice Beato’s “Tōkaidō Road.” At the time, photographs that felt truly ‘authentic’ were considered revolutionary: the difference between a photograph made in the studio and reworked and retouched there afterwards, and a photograph taken outdoors and left to speak for itself on its own merits, was clearly noticeable. Beato’s insistence on the later approach is what makes him today be considered among the first true documentary photographers. Japan exerted a particular fascination upon him. As the main connection between Kyoto, the imperial capital, and Edo (now Tokyo), the capital of the Tokugawa shoguns, the road known as Tōkaidō played an important role in the history, literature, and art of Japan. Beato’s photographs and accompanying captions explore the famous ancient highway through the lens of the living history and culture of Beato’s own time.
 
Ansel Adam’s large-format photograph of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite National Park bears a special defining aesthetic about itself. Adams, internationally renowned landscape photographer and photo writer, experienced with a wide variety of cameras and regularly experimenting with new processes and approaches, was a founding member of one of the most forward-looking photography collectives in the United States – called f/64 – and an influential representative of the style known as straight or pure photography. Adams sought in nature visual echoes to his own intuition; in this vivid, sharply detailed photograph, he allows the massive summit of Sentinel Rock to fill nearly the entire image, seeming somehow cradled there even in its cragged immensity.
 
The color Polaroids of Nobuyoshi Araki, undoubtably among the contemporary world’s most important photographic practitioners, complete our exhibition. Araki’s unique, intimate images of flowers in close detail reflect the forms and shapes of an ideal natural order, hinting towards the similarities and relationships we might all sense in our own human bodies.

 

Exhibition: Temporarily closed due to construction work July 14 – September 13, 2022 / by appointment only
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request.
 
Send Request  

 

 

 

Markus Lüpertz

 

Exhibition: May 19 – June 28, 2022
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send your inquiry via button below

 
 

 

Traveling Photographers

 

Exhibition: March 24 – May 3, 2022 | extended til May 10, 2022
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send your inquiry via button below
 
Send Inquiry  
 

 

Wintershow in Munich

 

Exhibition: February 10, 2022 – March 22, 2022
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send your inquiry via button below
 
Send Inquiry  
 

Download exhibition list here
 

 
 

NASA, Apollo & Co

 

Exhibition: December 2, 2021 – February 8, 2022
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send an email to: contact@danielblau.com
 

 

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