Beauty is difficult to defined. Every era, every generation, everyone is evaluating beauty according to their own culture—dependent criteria and conventions, or they try to undermine it. Volatile, transient, yet omnipresent, beauty can hardly be specified. It is rarely uncontroversial, sometimes bulky and it is not easily accessible. Beauty and art have always been closely connected.
The exhibition Strange Beauty illustrates how differently and even unexpectedly artists choose to approach or exploit beauty as a subject, often hidden. It features artists from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present, both renowned and young contemporaries. A choice of different media, techniques and genres interact with each other to lend vitality and power of expression to the subject. The exhibition focuses on painting, sculpture and photography.
Portraits from the 1950s and 1960s by photographers Lucien Clergue and Diane Arbus are the earliest exhibits of this show. Paintings by Gerhard Hoehme, Chris Reinecke and Norbert Tadeusz, a drawing by Gerhard Altenbourg and a sculpture by Magdalena Abakanowicz further make up the historic part of the exhibition. The contemporary section comprises, amongst others, photographs by Roger Ballen, Joachim Brohm, Jürgen Klauke, Richard Mosse and Thomas Wrede; paintings by Leiko Ikemura, Susanne Kühn, Wolfe von Lenkiewicz, Heribert C. Ottersbach, Norbert Schwontkowski and Miriam Vlaming; drawings by Monica Ursina Jäger, Robert Longo, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra and Robert Wilson; as well as sculptures by Bertozzi & Casoni, Gehard Demetz and Katsura Funakoshi.
A cataloge will be published on occasion of the exhibition.
Press release courtesy Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art.
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