Eugene
von Bruenchenhein
Marie!
Marie! I long for you
March
11 – April 23, 2016
Opening:
Friday, 11.3., 6–9 pm
 |
Eugene
von Bruenchenhein,
untitled,
undated (1940s-50s)
Gelatin
silver print, 25.4
x 17.8 cm. Courtesy of Delmes & Zander. |
Delmes
& Zander I Berlin will show the photographs of “Marie” by
visionary artist Eugene von
Bruenchenhein shot in the 1940s and 1950s.
An
artist with unpaired creative output, von
Bruenchenhein (born 1910) produced an expansive universe of multiple
mediums spanning from poetry, photography, ceramics, sculpture,
painting and ballpoint drawing for over a 50-year period, between the
late 1930s until his death in 1983. He lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
and worked as a baker during most of his life, but cultivated a
passion for botany and history, and wrote extensively on his own
metaphysical theories of biological and cosmological origins and the
primal genesis of a genetically encoded collective knowledge.
Most
remarkable perhaps are von Bruenchenhein's countless photographs of
his lifelong obsession „Marie” (her real name was Eveline Kalke),
his wife and muse he had met in 1939 at a state fair in Wisconsin and
who he believed descendent from blue blooded royalty. Shot before
patterned backdrops (often curtains or bedsheets with leaf and floral
motifs) with exotic costumes, strings of beads and even ornaments for
Christmas trees, von Bruenchenhein turned Marie into the object of
his desires in intimate vignettes: a tropical princess, a topless
ingénue, a Madonna or a tinseltown vamp staged in a luscious mise en
scène at their domestic Midwestern home, where he developed the
photographs in a makeshift darkroom. His work was
known mainly to family and closed friends during von Bruenchenhein's
lifetime, but was only publicly recognized after his death.
In
recent years, Eugene von Bruenchenheins work has been shown at the
New Museum (2008), the American Folk Art Museum (2010-11), the
Hayward Gallery London (2013) and the international group show at the
2013 Venice Biennale.
It
is represented in outstanding museum collections including the John
Michael Kohler Arts Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, American
Folk Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
This exhibition was organized in collaboration with Andrey Edlin Gallery, New York.
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