Category: EXHIBITIONS

April 20, 2012 – May 25, 2012

 
This April Daniel Blau Ltd. is very pleased to present a selection of images that question the role of identity and scale the vintage photographic oeuvre. Since photography’s beginning the question of representation and truth has been widely discussed, complicated by the medium’s insistence on “realism”. In a photograph grandeur is minimised, compacted, and fixed like Baltic amber pulled from the sea, ensnaring the maker’s “vision” in reduced format.

Moving along into the 20th century, photographic technology advanced to such a degree that the operator of the camera no longer even needed to be present – imagine the first view of Earth from Space encrypted in video and produced in a Californian Lab. We can think back to the origins of photography and to Daguerre with his famous dioramas – large-scale theatrical backdrops that intended to represent more closely the feeling of being pulled into a vision of the mountains and streams of ancient Greece. So what happens when we reduce the idea of optics to a singular two-dimensional object? Can we identify our place within the frame or must we also compress, reduce, and rend the photograph to fit our own scale within the universe?

We live in a new era of rapid technological advancements built upon major achievements such as the infamous atomic bomb testings in the Pacific atolls. Why should our understanding of our place within the frame not also advance?

Please join us for our opening on Thursday 19th April from 6 – 9 pm at 51 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB.

February 22, 2012 – March 3, 2012

A special preview at our Munich gallery of our exhibition in New York opening at C.G. Boerner on March 27th.

As Picasso was the central star for painting and Man Ray for modern photography, Gustave Le Gray was the prominent figure early 19th Century photographers had to conquer before they could make a name for themselves.

Like many of his colleagues, Le Gray was a painter before he enthusiastically embraced the new medium of photography. By 1849 he had entered the Paris photo scene with his calotype landscapes taken in Fontainebleau and from there found further influence teaching photography to a group of students including Du Camp, Le Secq, Mestral and Tournachon, who in turn would also go on to achieve great fame in photography.

His ground breaking inventions rapidly set new standards for size and quality. In 1857, his Vague Brisée, a “snap-shot” of a small boat with wind-filled sails and a breaking wave in the foreground, was shown to an approving and fascinated audience.

As a technical perfectionist, Le Gray was above all a great painter with the camera.

In addition to the excellent Vague Brisée three new discoveries will be shown, calotypes taken at Fontainebleau castle. Rare treasures from the estate of his colleague Le Secq, they appear to be the only surviving examples of these images.

We are thrilled to present these works to our American audience and consider our gallery very fortunate to reintroduce these pictures to the œuvre of Le Gray.

Please click here for information about our New York exhibition

February 17, 2012 – April 13, 2012

 
“If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.”
Ruth Bernhard
 
What we see here are unique paper negatives from the 1850’s by some of the greatest old master photographers. They are the true originals, created by the light reflecting off the photographed subject. For their beauty, zeitgeist, rarity and provenance they rank amongst the greatest treasures of photography.

The paper negative had its heyday for a brief period in the early days of photography until c. 1860. Because the negative is the plate from which a multitude of positive prints can be made, it normally remained in the photographer’s possession during his lifetime. Only later would it enter into public collections by will of the photo-grapher or the family’s donation. It is rare to find negatives by famous artists such as Le Secq, Nègre, de Beaucorps or de Clercq in private hands.

A negative can be so much more evocative than a positive print. We realize from the blurred movement of the clock’s hand on the picture of the Palazzo Vecchio that it took 3 minutes of exposure time to take the photo, long enough to empty the square of all the people moving about. Their movements made them invisible to the camera. Only the building remains in its static existence with the guard’s rifles leaning against the wall.

Like a printing plate, the photographic negative has long been regarded as a stage in a working process.  Surrealism and other lessons in art have taught us how to look at the more abstract pictures of the world. We have since begun to appreciate the photographic paper negative with its saturated, ominous dark against the ethereal pale as a work of art in its own mysterious beauty!

December 13, 2011 – January 31, 2012

 
Daniel Blau is pleased to present a unique collection of rare vintage NASA photographs. These incredible pictures depict the wonder and awe of space travel.

These photographs have become part of our collective visual memory for the twentieth century; pictures that markedly symbolise the speed and power of post-war technological development at a time when Cold War tension was rife between the US and Russia. And so began the space race; the period of the 1960’s that saw the first man on the Moon. Missile technology, taken from Germany at the close of  WWII, set the technological precedence for manned space crafts to orbit the Earth, eventually landing on lunar soil: a period in human history incomparable to any other; photographed, with immense beauty, for the whole world to gaze in astound.

These are not simple snap-shots by an amateur, taken with a Kodak box, but the result of the combined efforts of thousands of workers and scientists at NASA. Indeed, these are the most expensive photographs ever produced. To see these prints in the flesh is an experience as close to bouncing on lunar soil as any of us will ever get. These magnificent landscapes can be compared to Gustav Le Gray’s large prints of  Fontainebleau or his seascapes. Today we treasure these vintage prints for their artistic quality and as permanent visual evidence of a time when the future seemed so close…
 
‘…Our first shock comes as we stop our spinning motion and swing ourselves around so as to bring the Moon into view. We have not been able to see the Moon for nearly a day now, and the change is electrifying. The Moon I have known all my life, that two-dimensional small yellow disk in the sky, has gone away somewhere, to be replaced by the most awesome sphere I have ever seen. To begin with, it is huge, completely filling our window. Second, it is three-dimensional. The belly of it bulges out toward us in such a pronounced fashion that I almost feel I can reach to touch it…’

– Michael Collins, Apollo XI, July 1969 (NASA Sp-350, 1975, p. 207)

December 14, 2011 – December 22, 2011, 2012

 
Please join us for a rummage through a collection of enigmatic and vernacular photographs put together over the span of 13 years. From wall to table, all photographs, at your perusal, will be available for sale from 80 English pounds upwards. For this special Christmas event we have extended the gallery hours to include Sunday the 18th December, 11am to 6pm.

October 11, 2011 – December 12, 2011, 2012

 
On the occasion of Gerhard Richter’s major retrospective at the Tate Modern this October, Daniel Blau Ltd. will be housing a parallel exhibition entitled “Benjamin Katz: Gerhard Richter – Atlas Exchanged”.The result of a friendship spanning more than four decades between Richter and Katz, this selection of 80 photographs is taken from the photographer’s vintage archive and includes portraits taken from the 1980s onwards at a variety of locations, including Richter in his studio.

Not confined to the canvas, Richter’s dialogue with photography, prints, and other media present an unequivocal insight into the post-war artist finding his subject matter through whichever media is at hand. The importance of Richter’s body of work “Atlas” is now well documented; serving to highlight the artist’s life’s work and processes through a spiraling amalgamation of imagery culled from his archive. In direct relation to this, we present Katz’s consistent documentation of the spirit of Richter living amongst his work: Katz fashions his photographs in such a way as not to intrude, but, rather to be part of an exchange of ideas found deep within Richter’s sprawling oeuvre.

October 21, 2011 – December 23, 2011

 
During the Kunstwochenende (Munich Art Weekend) Daniel Blau will be showing the works of British artist Rachel Kneebone. In her first solo show in Germany, Kneebone will exhibit a group of finely detailed porcelain sculptures. These objects grapple with themes of sexuality and death, drawing the viewer into a dark yet humorous world. Taking influence from such things as Dante’s Divine Comedy, William Blake’s The Primaeval Giants Sunk in the Soil (1824–1827) and Ovid’s Metamorphosis, these often phallic, grotesque yet enigmatic sculptures are riddled with a shiny, contorted tale of beauty at its point closest to sex and death.
 
Kneebone was born in 1973 in Oxfordshire and graduated from the renowned Royal College of Art in London in 2004. In 2005 she was nominated for the MaxMara Art Prize for Women, and that same year, Mario Testino invited her to create a wall sculpture for his show, Diana, Princess of Wales, at Kensington Palace. In 2010 she was awarded the audience prize at the 11th Sculpture Triennial in Felbach. Kneebone lives and works in London.

September 1, 2011 – October 6, 2011

 
An exhibition of vintage, anonymous, vernacular and spirit photography, also including works by Fratelli Alinari, Cecil Beaton, René Barthélemy, Paul Berthier, Emil Cadoo, Louis Joseph Deflube, Arthur Conan Doyle, JH Engstrom, Walker Evans, Jean-Baptiste Frenet, Michael Grieve, Bill Jacobsen, Fritz Lang, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Charles Marville, Tina Modotti, Floris Neusüss, Arnold Newman, Diane Pernet, Leni Riefenstahl, Henri Sauvaire, Jeffrey Silverthorne, Edmund Teske, U.S. Army Picture Corps, Louis Vignes et al.
 
“They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream.”
Jorge Luis Borges
 
We are pleased to present a unique set of images that embody a theme particularly relevant to current artistic and cultural practice: that of the haunted, the blurred and the dissolved. To exemplify these themes this exhibition will feature vintage prints as well as more recent explorations in photography and its often-dissolute processes. In homage to the alchemy and chemistry of photography, this show will illustrate fire, smoke, the spirit, the x-ray, blur and motion, decay and the photogram. Like a series of dark objects and entities trapped behind the framing of glass, the gallery space becomes a chapel to the haunted history of the photographic medium.

July 7, 2011 – August 10, 2011

 
Daniel Blau Ltd. is pleased to present Neal Fox’s latest project Beware of the God. Fox’s drawings depict a phantasmagoric journey through the detritus and mythology of pop culture. From a life-long obsession with the tales of his dead grandfather, a World War II bomber pilot, writer and hell raiser, his large-scale drawings have developed into increasingly layered celebrations of the debauched and iconoclastic characters whose ideas have helped shape our collective consciousness.

Fox’s latest project takes many of the recurring subjects of his drawings and portrays them through the medium of the stained glass window. As traditional church windows show the iconography of saints, through representations of events in their lives, instruments of martyrdom and iconic motifs, Fox plays with the symbolism of each character’s cult of personality; Albert Hoffman takes a psychedelic bicycle ride above the LSD molecule, J G Ballard dissects the world, surrounded by 20th Century imagery and the eroticism of the car crash, and Johnny Cash holds his inner demon in chains after a religious experience in Nickerjack cave. One quality in particular binds these characters and the others together; a refusal to conform and conviction in their own ideology.

Working with traditional methods at the renowned Franz Mayer of Munich manufacturer, Fox is producing a set of twelve 2.5 metre high stained-glass windows; exhibited in a single room – an alternative church of alternative saints.

June 9, 2011 – October 14, 2011

 
Parallel to his retrospective at Haus der Kunst, Munich, the American artist Matt Mullican will be showing at Galerie Daniel Blau.

The works of Mullican, born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California, hang in the most important collections and museums around the world; among them the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Tate Modern, London.

We will be showing a selection of pieces created between 1970 and 2011, taken from previous gallery exhibitions Mullican has had over the years with Daniel Blau. Central to this exhibition will be five large stained-glass windows, made by the artist at the Mayer’sche Hofkunstanstalt in Munich in 2010 and shown here for the first time.