Category: FAIRS
FAIRS
Paris Photo 2024
The Brilliance of the Actual View
It is easy to overlook, like forgetting the fact of our breathing: nothing is more often photographed than air.
Take that simple observation, though, and expand it, explode it, play with it – and whole new worlds of possibility reveal themselves. For Paris Photo 2024, DANIEL BLAU aims to do exactly that. Air is our theme, its absence, its alteration.
We look forward to seeing you in Paris.
PARIS PHOTO
Grand Palais
75007 Paris
Booth: B24
Fair Dates:
Public Opening:
November 7 – 9, 2024
Opening Hours:
1 pm – 8 pm
November 10, 2024
Opening Hours:
1 pm – 7 pm
Art Basel 2024
DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present an exhibition of eleven outstanding artists exploring the fissures at the hinge of humanity this year at ART BASEL 2024.
Dan Asher, Georg Baselitz, George Condo, Jean Fautrier, Llyn Foulkes, Antonius Höckelmann, Eugène Leroy, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, Don Van Vliet and Andy Warhol.
Interior and exterior, landscape and mindset, chaos and form: art thrives on tracing the dichotomies of our human existence in the world, and the mid-20th century found its great artists toying with and teasing out the creative potential of our fundamental conflicts with vibrant energy.
Fair Dates:
Vernissage:
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
5 pm – 8 pm
Public Days:
June 13 – 16, 2024
11 am – 7 pm
Booth E16
Messeplatz 10
4005 Basel
Download press release here
Andy Warhol – Daido Moriyama
January 19 – 28, 2024
DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present ten new works by Daido Moriyama, along with seven of Andy Warhol’s drawings from the 1950s, at the 2024 edition of The Winter Show, taking place in New York City from January 19th to 28th.
Andy Warhol moved to New York City in 1949, immediately after earning his bachelor’s degree. He quickly made a name for himself in the sphere of commercial art, making illustrations for advertising campaigns and fashion magazines. The city shaped Warhol’s career, and during his first decade there he allowed himself to follow a dual approach to his art, a dichotomy that can be clearly seen in these drawings. On the one hand, he established his own personal freehand style, instinctive and thoughtful; on the other, he
began creating images that were easily reproducible and in unmistakable conversation with the world of advertising into which he had stepped. It was also during this phase of his career that Warhol developed his ‘blotted line’ technique, which allowed him to present a variety of different versions of his advertising ideas to clients.
Moriyama’s new works are the products of a richly complex process of creation, too. His typical approach to work involves walking through the streets around him, impulsively photographing his surroundings to capture the essence of any place he finds himself in. During his monthlong trip to New York in 1971, Moriyama employed a 35mm “half-frame”
camera, meaning that each negative frame would in fact hold two, halfsized individual exposures. Each ‚complete image‘ shows the subject in two facets captured moments apart. The artist captured over 2,000 images this way.
In 2023, Moriyama used a screen-printing technique to transfer a selection of these dual images onto large, individual canvases. The resulting works showcase Moriyama’s long-standing interest in the concept of “are, bure, bokeh”– roughly translatable as “rough, coarse, out-of-focus” – which, here,illuminates, evoked in shimmering bronzes and blacks, the atmosphere of a New York at night.
Moriyama’s 2023 creations still carry all the spontaneity of his work in 1971. His return to the series after more than fifty years also shows his rethinking of the artistic process and his experimenting with possibilities of repetition. He was surely also inspired by Andy Warhol’s concept of “seriality”. In fact, it was Warhol himself who lured Moriyama to New York in the first place and Moriyama photographed him at the time.
Our Winter Show exhibition for 2024 is able to show how these two artists respond to the city in ways that both diverge and intersect, that distinguish themselves and occasionally overlap. Warhol and Moriyama were both drawn to New York’s zeal for commerce and advertising – Warhol to Madison Avenue, where he found success as a commercial
artist, and Moriyama to the bright lights and neon signs of the city itself (recurring motifs found not only in this series but across his entire oeuvre). The use of street photography, Moriyama’s defining genre, was also a part of Warhol’s artistic process, as was the use of a range of loosely categorizable subjects including cats, cars, and flowers. We can see how these motifs came to engage Moriyama as well as he explored the city, whether wandering the Flower District or the corridors of his hotel. Both artists also clearly felt drawn to pay particular attention to the city’s fire hydrants: Moriyama photographs one in the instants before it is lost in clouds of New York City street steam, while Warhol flanks his hydrants with two women’s cartoonish legs, seemingly leaning against the red iron. Those female feet bear shoes of special noteworthiness: they are drawn in the same style that earned Warhol his job as the ‘sole’ illustrator for the I. Miller shoe company between 1955 and 1957.
DOWNLOAD press release Winter Show 2024
Opening Night Party:
January 18, 2024, 5 – 9 pm
Young Collectors Night:
January 25, 2024, 6 – 9 pm
Connoisseurs Night:
January 26, 2024, 5:30 – 8 pm
Opening Hours:
Friday, Jan. 19, 12 pm – 8 pm
Saturday, Jan. 20, 12 pm – 7 pm
Sunday, Jan. 21, 12 pm – 6 pm
Monday, Jan. 22, 12 pm – 8 pm
Tuesday, Jan. 23, 12 pm – 5 pm
Wednesday, Jan. 24, 12 pm – 8 pm
Thursday, Jan. 25, 12 pm – 5 pm
Friday, Jan. 26, 12 pm – 8 pm
Saturday, Jan. 27, 12 pm – 7 pm
Sunday, Jan. 28, 12 pm – 6 pm
Visit Website: The Winter Show
The 70th edition of The Winter Show will be held in the historic Park Avenue Armory where a breadth of works spanning 5,000 years will be presented by over 68 internationally renowned dealers. Myriad works from paintings and works on paper, fine furniture, and design, to jewelry, and contemporary ceramics and glass will be on view. Famed for its rigorous vetting practices carried out by a committee of 120 experts, the Fair’s exhibitors offer works of the highest standards of authenticity and quality in the industry.
illustration: © 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
and © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery, Tokyo
Paris Photo 2023
DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present three exhibitions at Paris Photo 2023, each one a special insight into a particular and fascinating facet of photography.
Exceptional NASA Pictures
These photographs draw us into the extraordinary world of American space exploration in the 1960s and 70s. During this period of historically groundbreaking discovery, every achievement of the Space Race became a global sensation, and this once - fresh sense of wonder, awe and inspiration lives on in these photographs. They represent not only the significance of this period for scientific innovation, the advancement of technology and the furthering of mankind’s knowledge of the universe, but also the artistic capabilities of such phenomenal images to transport the viewer, instantly igniting emotion and curiosity.
Featuring photographs taken on such celebrated missions as (among others) Friendship 7, Gemini 4, Apollo 11 and Mariner 9, this exhibition takes us into the heart of the early space exploration. A photograph taken on the Apollo 11 crew’s return journey to Earth shows the Moon as it had never been seen before - a conquest of humanity, a glittering prize newly-won. The first ever EVA (extravehicular activity) – or spacewalk – performed by an American is shown in an oversized photograph of Ed White during Gemini 4. The palpable silence of the image reflects its wondrous subject, and the insufficiency of words to produce a response to the sight of it. Mariner 9’s photographs of the Martian surface describe another historically unprecedented encounter with the Solar System; as the first spacecraft ever to orbit another planet, its over 7,000 images of Mars reflect the ambition and intellectual hunger of NASA of this era. Another photograph in this exhibition was taken by John H. Glenn, Jr. during Friendship 7, the solo mission upon which, in February 1962, when became the first American to orbit the Earth. His color photograph of the brilliantly - lit space particles he famously described as ‘fireflies’, for lack of knowledge to explain them at the time, awakens the sense of fascinated mystery with which the world then viewed space, and which drove the determination of scientists to seek, scrutinize and attempt to ‘solve’ it.
Masterworks of Photo Retouching
The second of DANIEL BLAU’s exhibitions at this year’s Paris Photo showcases the striking and unusual effects of photo retouching in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
During this time, the potential to alter the perceived meaning of a photograph was explored to thrilling effect. Retouching using a stylus could add detail, reinforce lines, enhance contrast and easily bring any element of the photograph to the fore. The introduction of gouache allowed dramatic emphasis to be created. Being so dark and impenetrable, it could also subtly obscure a photograph’s features as desired by the editor, or create impactful silhouettes, as we see in “Exercises”.
Among these photographs are also several amazing examples of the art of airbrush. A small, handheld tool that was originally invented in 1879 by the American Francis E. Stanley, the airbrush combines paint with blown air to enable a smooth, even application of pigment across a surface – a spraying technique which can be thought of as a precursor to the spray-paint canister of today. Stanley used the airbrush to colorize images, but it can also add entirely new visual elements to a photograph, as this exhibition demonstrates. For example, the light translucency of the airbrush used on “Normandy, France: Ours Not to Reason Why” gives the cross its ghostly, ethereal appearance, exquisitely embellishing both the subject matter and the artistic meaning of the image.
This curation of photographs exhibits the capacity of photo retouching to evoke a sense of the unexpected, of surprise, curiosity, imagination and experimentation, and to add layers of complex, nuanced messaging to captivating, existing photographs whether satirical, commercial, historical or political.
Daido Moriyama – New Works
This exhibition features 22 new paintings Japanese artist Daido Moriyama based on photographs he had taken in New York City in 1971. These pictures perfectly encapsulate Moriyama’s unmistakeable style of his trademark strong contrast. Here the artist achieves an incomparable sense of atmosphere by using his concept of are, bure, bokeh (meaning grainy, blurred and out of focus) to document his immediate surroundings – the everyday occurrences of New York City encountered by his camera.
Each canvas displays two consecutive exposures in a single negative, the result of Moriyama’s own modification of his 35mm camera; the artist chose these moments spontaneously but communicates them with much more consideration. By showing us each instant from two perspectives at once, Moriyama invites us closer to them, letting us begin to absorb whatever intangible, fleeting impulse it was that prompted him to take out his camera.
Download press release Paris Photo 2023
ONLINE VIEWING ROOM
PARIS PHOTO
Grand Palais Éphémère
Place Joffere
75007 Paris
Booth B14
Fair Dates:
Vernissage (by invitation only):
Opening Hours:
Wednesday,
November 8, 2023
5 pm – 9 pm
Public Opening:
November 9 – 11, 2023
Opening Hours:
1 pm – 8 pm
November 12, 2022
Opening Hours:
1 pm – 7 pm
Paris
The Occupation of Paris during World War II was a dark and harrowing time for the city and its people. For four years, Paris was under Nazi control, and the citizens endured hardship, deprivation, and constant fear. However, on August 25th, 1944, Parisians rose up against the occupying forces in what became known as the Liberation of Paris. The city was finally freed, and the resistance fighters, alongside Allied Forces, marched triumphantly through the streets.
The events of that historic day were captured by several photographers, providing a vivid and powerful representation of the city’s liberation.
Amongst them, those working for LIFE Magazine, are the focus of this exhibition.
Exhibition Dates:
exhibition at Galerie Meyer:
17, rue des Beaux-Arts
75006 Paris – France
Vernissage:
November 2, 2023
2:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Public Exhibition:
November 3 – 25, 2023
opening hours:
tuesday to friday
2:30 pm – 6:00 pm
and
saturdays
11:00 am – 1:00 pm,
2:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Download press release
Art Basel 2023
For ART Basel 2023, and the second part of the jubilee celebration for over 30 years of Blau at ART Basel, we are pleased to present a rich selection of renowned European and American artists. The online exhibition will include outstanding works by Ottone Rosai, Georg Baselitz, Antonius Höckelmannm Llyn Foulkes, Julian Schnabel, George Condo, Elaine Sturtevant and Hans Arp.
We look forward to seeing you in Basel.
Fair Dates:
Vernissage:
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
5 pm – 8 pm
Public Days:
June 15 – 18, 2023
11 am – 7 pm
Booth E15
Messeplatz 10
4005 Basel
Paris Photo 2022
DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present a trio of outstanding exhibitions at this year’s PARIS PHOTO. The renowned Munich gallery has emphasized photography since its foundation, and takes pride in its international reach and reputation and the range of contacts it has earned. This year, its contribution to PARIS PHOTO encompasses nearly 80 photographs, a tripartite arch spanning from early, massive cityscapes of Rome to wartime photographs capturing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the first, fascinating examples of photography from space. This is mankind at its most grandiose and monumental – but also at its most dangerous, and ominous.
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.
The exhibition “KRONOS” features photographs taken on December 7th, 1941, of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The photographic propaganda material that helped define perceptions of the surprise attack stemmed from unlikely sources, from snapshots and the corners of unintentionally well-timed holiday memories. An otherwise innocuous beach scene contains a massive explosion; a section of Pearl Harbor is found in a birds-eye overview. We see concentric waves making their way towards a row of ships – in only a moment the waves’ torpedo will strike one. Daniel Blau has assembled an important collection of photographs, from multiple origins and a wide variety of techniques, documenting the attack. U.S. Navy photographers and rarely represented Imperial Japanese Army photographers are displayed alongside one another for the first time. What results is a haunting window into one brief instant in time, the historic flash of an unanticipated, world-altering attack, into the very nature of war photography and propaganda, and into the artistry and philosophical perspectives at play between explosions and snapping shutters.
One more highlight of this year’s presentation brings us into the classical past and before a different sort of grandeur, a monumental modern image of an antique monument. The largest enclosed building of the ancient world, the Roman Colosseum, was captured in photography by the Roman urban photographers Tommaso Cuccioni (1790-1864) and Giuseppe Ninci (1823-1890). The building itself dates to AD 79; the print is the earliest dated work our gallery is showing at Paris Photo, and one of the earliest large-format architectural photographs of any kind. It is an unusual piece of art, an albumen print almost 1.5 meters wide and executed in three parts. Ninci learned the craft of photography in Cuccioni’s studio, opening his own around 1866 not far from the Spanish Steps. Both photographers were known for their oversized topographic images of the Eternal City, as spectacular in their own right as the ancient edifices themselves are.
PARIS PHOTO
Grand Palais Éphémère
Place Joffere
75007 Paris
Booth B14
Fair Dates:
Vernissage (by invitation only):
Opening Hours:
Wednesday,
November 9, 2022
3 pm – 9 pm
Public Opening:
November 10 – 12, 2022
Opening Hours:
1 pm – 8 pm
November 13, 2022
Opening Hours:
1 pm – 7 pm
Tondo
DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present “TONDO,” a truly unique exhibition of vintage pictures connected by their unusually well-rounded focus, for the PhotoSaintGermain Festival 2022.
The 23 photographs featured in the Anthony Meyer rooms, stretching in origin all the way back to the earliest days of the artform in the early nineteenth century, range from cityscape to portraiture, from images of far-off lunar craters to the architectural gems around us. What unifies them all is, of course, roundness, whether in their subject matter, in the technology behind them, or in the framing of the very photograph itself.
Tondi have an age-old place in art history, and with the advent of photography took a step into the modern world as well. Experimentation in roundness has been present from the first lens down through the innovation of the fisheye in the 1960s and ‘70s, reflecting the zeitgeist and aesthetic impulses of every generation from Voigtländer to Nikon. Here, DANIEL BLAU, together with SERGE PLANTUREUX, has brought together an extraordinary curation of roundness through the decades, outstanding work that encompasses historic milestones and natural timelessness, anonymous faces and monumental profiles. Lightning watchers at the Empire State are frozen in time by John Alger, beside Alvin Landon Coburn’s view of colleague Alfred Stieglitz.
“What is the aesthetic beauty of a circle? – or of a turning, curving movement,” DANIEL BLAU asks, in a recently published discussion between the two experts behind the exhibit. “Isn’t it something that is quite natural to us? Beginning with the iris being round, and the eye being round like a sphere, and the head being roundish, the sun and the moon being round… we are surrounded by all these spherical, and seemingly circular objects.” The reflection on and consideration of roundness is itself an endless one, always circling back upon itself, wherever we begin – the possibility, the potential, the resources, the subjects, the history, the technology, the very shape itself. Unusual as it can seem at first, the circle in photography is there at every turn.
The exhibition “TONDO” will be held in the Anthony Meyer Rooms at PhotoSaintGermain between November 3rd and 19th, 2022.
Exhibition Dates:
November 3rd – 19th, 2022
opening hours:
tuesday to friday
2:30 pm – 6:00 pm
and
saturdays
11:00 am – 1:00 pm
exhibition at Galerie Meyer:
17, rue des Beaux-Arts
75006 Paris – France
Art Basel 2022
The 1980s, important years in painting, have always been a point of focus at DANIEL BLAU. On the occasion of our 30th anniversary exhibition at Art Basel, we will show highlights of our program, featuring works by renowned artists including Georg Baselitz (*1938), Alfred Jensen (1903-1981), Francis Gruber (1912-1948), Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911), Anselm Kiefer (*1945), Eugène Leroy (1910-2000), Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Emilio Vedova (1919-2006) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Our exhibition will focus on the 1980s, with a large untitled gestural painting by Vedova from 1983 and a colorful brush stroke painting “The Old Tree” by Lichtenstein from the following year, complemented by the “Adlerkopf” painted by Baselitz (1986). Alongside these grandmasters, some artists working outside the main-stream are also of interest, such as Hill, Gruber and Jensen, who have been so influential to modern and contemporary artists alike. Hill, who had an academic education in Paris, almost exclusively used pencil and paper after his nervous breakdown in 1878, producing a large body of works on paper, which have been inspirational to artists ever since, will be exhibited for the first time at Art Basel. The French Francis Gruber and Swedish Evert Lundquist are two further artists lesser known to the general public but heroes within the art community. Gruber, who unfortunately died at the age of 36, will also be shown at Art Basel for the first time. Further on view are drawings by Kiefer, Baselitz, Polke and Warhol.
We look forward to seeing you in Basel.
Fair Dates:
Privat Days:
June 14 – 15, 2022
11 am – 8 pm
Vernissage:
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
5 pm – 8 pm
Public Days:
June 16 – 19, 2022
11 am – 7 pm
Booth E15
Messeplatz 10
4005 Basel
Paris Photo 2021
Pioneers
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.
The second exhibition we will show at Paris Photo is a collection of original vintage NASA prints. Works include remarkable photographs from a range of twentieth century space missions, notably the Apollo XI moon landing in 1969 as well as the earlier Apollo VIII mission, which successfully orbited the moon before returning to Earth. The ‘Earthrise’ photographs of our planet taken from space are among the most beautiful and affecting of those from the space programmes Striking color photographs from Voyager missions to the outer reaches of our solar system feature the vivid details of Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s red spot. We will also show the first color photo taken on Mars, produced by NASA’s Viking Lander. Accompanying the NASA pictures are photos from the Soviet Zond programme – a series of robotic spacecraft launched between 1964 and 1970. Originally created for purposes of documentation and scientific enquiry, these pictures are now valued for their artistic merits as well as their historical significance.
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
Booth B14
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
+49 89 29 73 42