EVIDENCE OF ECSTASY /// OPENING at Galerie Susanne Zander, Cologne

Francesco Ponte, photo album, 1920s, photography and mixed media on cardboard, Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Berlin / Cologne

 Galerie Susanne Zander I Cologne presents in collaboration with Vosberg:

EVIDENCE OF ECSTASY

Laying on of Hands, Francesco Ponte, Ted Serios

November 27, 2015 – January 22, 2016

Opening: Friday, 27.11., 6–9 pm

After attracting considerable attention at Delmes & Zander in Berlin, the exhibition Evidence of Ecstasy is now brought to the Cologne. The exhibition offers a look into spiritual performance and its artistic documentation. Ecstatic states are captured on photography and film, as are out-of-body experiences and states of trance.

In the occult circles en vogue in the mid-19th to early 20th century, photography played an important role. So-called spirit photography strove to make the invisible and inconceivable visible. This was the case with the work of Francesco Ponte: In the 1920s, the Puerto Rican dentist created a unique album of spirit photographs. During a series of séances his medium Carmen Wey, a housekeeper, was seated in a cabinet behind closed curtains. When the curtains opened, impressions of invisible ghost 

hands and feet became visible. Ponte cast and subsequently photographed these impressions. His pictures are reminiscent of the surrealist photographs by Hans Bellmer or Jean Fautrier. Others show ectoplasm, in spiritualist circles considered the substance of choice for the manifestation of spirits. Ponte ornamented the 25-page photo album carefully by hand. His album was meant to move his children to continue their “Papi's” spiritualist legacy. The result is a rare and touching testimony of spiritualist photography.

A limited edition of Francesco Ponte's photo album will be released for the opening by Mörel Books in November 2015.

Laying on of Hands, untitled, 1960's, Vintage Print, 9 x 9 cm, Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Berlin / Cologne

The impressive collection of anonymous photographs Laying on of Hands, dating back to the 1960s, documents the ecstatic states of an African-American community: Children and adults are photographed in trance, some lying on the floor, many with their hands in the air, others with closed eyes. The participants lay hands on one another, perhaps as a gesture of spiritual healing. The photographs' perspective transports the euphoric mood. Unlike the work of Francesco Ponte, the photographs of Laying on of Hands do not serve as evidence of the spiritual, but rather as documentation.The expressive body serves as testimony to the metaphysical process.

But as much as the photographs reveal, at the same time they veil, intrigue, pose questions, and remain testimonials of a mysterious reality. As in the photographs and the film, the bodies themselves function as a medium, becoming open to the Other in their state of trance and embodying the absent. In the last decades much attention has been paid to the phenomenon of spiritual art. The comprehensive exhibition The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005) for example, testifies to this as much as the exhibition In the Realm of Phantoms: Photography of the Invisible curated by Andreas Fischer and Veit Loers at Museum Abteiberg, Möchengladbach (1997-1998).

In the mid-1960s, Ted Serios (1918–2006) demonstrated hauntingly his ability to mentally will images [so-called “thoughtotographs”] onto photographic film before the running film camera. During sessions of intense physical and mental concentration he was able to produce a variety of images onto celluloid. His powerful performances challenge the evidentiary value of film.

A documentary film on Ted Serios' performances is part of the exhibition Evidence of Ecstasy and will be shown at the newly opened space Vosberg (Roonstr. 108, 50674 Cologne, Wednesday through Saturday from 1 – 6 pm, www.vosberg.cologne). This film is shown with kind permission of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene e. V. in Freiburg im Breisgau.

HORST ADEMEIT featured in "BIG BANG DATA" at Somerset House, London

Horst Ademeit, untitled 13.4.1993, inscribed polaroid, 11 x 9 cm, Copyright Delmes & Zander, Berlin / Cologne

HORST ADEMEIT featured in 

"BIG BANG DATA"

at Somerset House, London

03 Dec 2015 - 28 Feb 2016

"Emails, selfies, shopping transactions, Google searches, dating profiles: every day we’re producing data in huge quantities. Our online activity, alongside that of businesses and governments, has led to a massive explosion – a ‘Big Bang’ – of data.

This radical shift in the volume, variety and speed of data being produced, combined with new techniques for storage, access, and analysis, is what defines the proliferation of data. It is radically reshaping our world and is set to revolutionise everything we do.

Data today gives us new ways of doing things: from scientific research to business strategy, politics to social interaction, our new data-driven society that has the potential to be more fair, stable, and efficient and yet it also created a tools for unprecedented mass surveillance and commodification. Data access and usage rights, along with the value they comprise, are at the heart of many concerns.

Big Bang Data explores the issues surrounding the datafication of our world through the work of artists, designers, journalists and visionaries. As the data explosion accelerates, we ask if we really understand our relationship with data, and explore the meaning and implications of data for our future."

Read more HERE

www.somersethouse.org.uk

Independent New York Announces Exhibitors for March 2016

Photo: Evan Joseph / Courtesy: Spring Studios New York

The exhibitor's list for the INDEPENDENT NEW YORK
(March 3 - 6, 2016) is out and we are on it!

Participants:

Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York — The Approach, London — Artists Space, New York — The Box, Los Angeles — Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome — Bureau, New York — CANADA, New York — Chapter NY, New York — C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels — Paula Cooper Gallery, New York — Elizabeth Dee, New York — Thomas Erben Gallery, New York — Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia — Garth Greenan Gallery, New York — gb agency, Paris — Jay Gorney / Derek Eller Gallery, New York — Herald St, London — Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles — JTT, New York —Karma, New York — Anton Kern Gallery, New York — David Kordansky, Los Angeles —Maccarone, New York — Martos Gallery, New York/Los Angeles — Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo —Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York — The Modern Institute, Glasgow — Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne/Berlin — Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt — Office Baroque, Brussels — Maureen Paley, London — Parra & Romero, Madrid/Ibiza — Peres Projects, Berlin — Project Native Informant, London — Silberkuppe, Berlin — Société, Berlin — Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London — Kerry Schuss, New York — Tilton Gallery, New York — Venus Over Manhattan, New York/Los Angeles —VI, VII, Oslo — White Columns, New York — Susanne Zander/Delmes & Zander, Cologne


MARCH 3 — 6, 2016
Spring Studios
50 Varick Street
New York, NY 10013

www.independentnewyork.com

Der Schatten der Avantgarde. Rousseau und die vergessenen Meister /// Museum Folkwang, Essen

André Bauchant, Portrait d'André Bauchant par lui-même, 1938
Sammlung Zander
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015

Der Schatten der Avantgarde 

Rousseau und die vergessenen Meister

2. Okt. 2015 – 10. Januar 2016

 

Ein Schatten begleitet die Avantgarden des 20. Jahrhunderts. Dieser Schatten sind die künstlerischen Autodidakten.*

"Sie sind Künstler und Künstlerinnen ohne akademische Ausbildung und zumeist ohne Zugang zu den hergebrachten und sich neu formierenden Verbreitungswegen. Ihre Werke jedoch sind in ihrem künstlerischen Anspruch, in ihrem ästhetischen Reichtum und ihrer unmittelbaren Intensität auf Augenhöhe mit den besten Künstlern des 20. Jahrhunderts. Diese ließen sich von ihren Werken in nicht zu unterschätzender Weise inspirieren, zollten ihnen hohen Respekt oder förderten sie zuweilen sogar. Die Ausstellung stellt 13 von ihnen mit zu kleinen Retrospektiven verdichteten Präsentationen von Hauptwerken vor und entfaltet damit ein Kaleidoskop unterschiedlichster Formen künstlerischer Kreativität.

Dschungel-Bilder und Portraits von Henri Rousseau wurden immer im Zusammenhang mit der Entwicklung der Moderne gesehen und in Ausstellungen wie in Sammlungspräsentationen selbstverständlich inmitten der Werke moderner Meister gezeigt. Anders die beunruhigenden, mit apokalyptischer Ikonografie aufgeladenen Blumenbilder von Séraphine Louis: Waren sie auf der Documenta von 1955 noch vertreten, sind sie heute erst wieder neu zu entdecken. Für die großformatigen Historienbilder von André Bauchant begeisterten sich Künstler wie Le Corbusier und Ozenfant. In ihrer Sprödigkeit erinnern sie an Fresken des Quattrocento. Die Akte und Tierdarstellungen von Morris Hirshfield sind in ihrer Textur kleinteilig wie Mosaiken und waren hoch geschätzt bei den Surrealisten.

Den Werkgruppen dieser Künstler sind Schlüsselwerke aus Moderne und Gegenwartskunst von Honoré Daumier über Paul Gauguin, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Fernand Léger und Pablo Picasso bis Blinky Palermo und Mike Kelley zur Seite gestellt. In der Gegenüberstellung werden Dimensionen dieser Werkkomplexe erschlossen, die das Spektrum der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts wesentlich vertieft haben. Es geht dabei darum, ein Phänomen aufzuspüren, das vergleichbar ist mit der Wirkungsgeschichte des Blues und Jazz in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (...).

*Der Titel „Der Schatten der Avantgarde“ stammt von Veit Loers.

Weitere Informationen zur Ausstellung finden Sie hier.
www. museum-folkwang.de

Museum Folkwang
Museumsplatz 1
45128 Essen

MORTON BARTLETT "Family Planning: early photographs and archival material" at Julie Saul Gallery (NY)

Morton Bartlett, untitled, ca. 1950, 13 x 10 cm, Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Berlin / Cologne

MORTON BARTLETT

"Family Planning. Early Photographs & Archival Material"

at Julie Saul Gallery (NY)
through December 23, 2015

"The Julie Saul Gallery is pleased to announce our second exhibition of photographic works and related materials by Morton Bartlett (1909-1992). Since Bartlett’s work was first shown here in 2007, his photographs and mannequin sculptures have been widely exhibited. As their appearance in Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 Venice Biennale demonstrated, their unique aura and superb craft have elevated them beyond the context of “self-trained” or “outsider” art. Bartlett was a master craftsman whose extensive knowledge of decorative techniques is demonstrated in the articles he wrote as the editor of the 1950s home-craft magazines, Bench & Brush and Decorator’s Letter from Home. He is known primarily for sculptures and photographs of dolls he created between 1935 and 1950 that were not discovered until the early 1990s. As he was beginning to create the sculptures, he worked as a child photographer. His portrait and study photographs give new insight into the development of his sculptural style. This exhibition aims to cast Bartlett’s life and art in a fresh light by bringing these never-before exhibited photographs of children from the mid-1930s together with the color and black and white photographs of the dolls (...)"

Please find further information here

www.saulgallery.com

MIROSLAV TICHY Opening 6 pm on Friday, November 6, 2015 at Delmes & Zander I Berlin

Miroslav Tichý

Drawings & Photographs
November 6, 2015 – January 16, 2016

Opening: Friday, 06.11., 6–9 pm

Miroslav Tichý went outdoors with his self-made cameras every day, capturing images of as many women as he could. To photograph a hundred women per day – this was the ultimate goal of the Czech artist, born 1926. In his quests, especially those in the 1980s and 1990s, he took innumerable voyeuristic photographs. The images of the women shot are blurred and generally out of focus.

The photographs show women walking in the street, sitting on park benches, at the swimming pool, always with a clear focus on breasts, legs, and behinds. A similar fondness is found in Tichý’s drawings, which he considered his primary artworks; although lesser known, they testify to the artistic stringency of the Czech artist.

Miroslav Tichy, untitled, undated (approx. 1960-70s), mixed media on paper, various formats

Courtesy Galerie Susanne Zander / Delmes & Zander (Cologne & Berlin)

The current exhibition allows for a possible and direct comparison between Tichý’s photographic works and his drawings, which show a similar eroticism, an appreciation of voluptuousness, common composition, the esthetic of imperfection, and a clear focus on women, the eternal object of his desires. As in his photographs, Tichý often leaves the faces of his women blank or obscured in his drawings, the focus of the image being of anatomical nature, such as his focus on constrained waists contrasted with ample hips.
 

After his education at the Academy of Arts Prague, Tichý began a promising career in the late 1940s as a rising avant-garde painter and draftsman. Because of the totalitarian doctrine of socialism, he ended up more and more in isolation, frequently imprisoned and even spending time in a psychiatric ward. He turns increasingly to photography. He maintained his radical anti-stance against the establishment even after the fall of the “Iron Curtain”.
 

Miroslav Tichy, untitled, undated (approx. 1980-90s), mixed media on photograph, 23.2 x 18.9 cm

Courtesy Galerie Susanne Zander / Delmes & Zander (Cologne & Berlin)

Miroslav Tichý’s works are represented in renowned collections worldwide such as the MMK – Museum for Modern Art, Frankfurt/ Main; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the F.C. Gundlach Collection at the Haus der Photographie Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, the Collection Antoine de Galbert, Paris, and the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection, Porto.

Miroslav Tichy

Drawings & Photography

November 6, 2015 -  January 16, 2016

Delmes & Zander I Berlin

Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 37, 10178 Berlin