Art Cologne 2023

16 – 19 November, 2023

Hall 11.1 / Booth C 131

Preview: Thursday, 16 November, 12pm – 8pm
Vernissage: Thursday, 16 November, 4 – 8 pm

At this year's edition of Art Cologne, Galerie Julian Sander and Galerie Les Douches, Paris, participate with a linked stand architecture and a jointly curated area on the theme of "Nudes in Photography".

On this occasion, Les Douches la Galerie will present a series of photographs revolving around the representation of the body. Formal, surreal, intimate, deconstructed, the body is a source of inspiration and desire, and an inexhaustible subject.

André Steiner (1901-1978) and Pierre Boucher (1908-2000), photographers from the 1930s, etched into modernity the bodies of swimmers and divers in swimming pools, new locations of relaxation that reveal the body and promote the health-benefits of sport.

While a student at the Bauhaus, Kurt Krantz (1910-1997) sublimated the play of reflections and light in a simple foot bath through a delicate photomontage of direct prints.

With his diver, in 1972, Ernst Haas (1921-1986) composed a genuine ode to colour – becoming one of its precursors – as the journalist Camille Balenieri notes: "In the photograph of the diver in Greece, colour is the true subject. The marine palette presents itself in all its infinite variability – azure, celadon, emerald, aqua and indigo – words are inadequate to describe it, whereas an image, in one instant, reveals all of its nuances."

François Kollar (1904-1979) and Germaine Krull (1897-1985) glorify the hand’s intelligence, highlighting the creations of the period’s great jewellers, while Roger Schall (1904-1995) creates some of the most disturbing photographs through the shadowplay of a hand on the pubis of his famous model Assia.

In the 1980s, the writer, critic and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) documented his private life, focusing in particular on his lovers. Bedrooms and bathrooms are some of the places where the male body is uncovered with great delicacy and in its simple truth.

The painter and surrealist photographer Pierre Molinier (1906-1976) uses his own body, or his model’s body, as the basis for erotic photomontages where legs, genitals and hands multiply in a dance of ecstasy.

Leon Levinstein (1913-1988)’s invasive bodies fill the photograph’s frame, block the image and finally disappear, leaving a glimpse of a second scene that the viewer only registers a moment later, when the bodies no longer seem to be seen.

Vivian Maier (1926-2009) breaks up bodies through framing, mirror effects and camera angles that turn a leg or a hand into a simple compositional object.

Finally, through games of construction / deconstruction, Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), the surrealist Val Telberg (1910-1995) and Roger Catherineau (1925-1962) show us that the mere presence of an eye in a composition gives body to people and that even a simple glance can bestow humanity.

Vast, but also little known in France, the photographic works of the artistic pioneer from Luxembourg, Romain Urhausen (1930-2021) are marked by his singular style, a mixture of the French humanist school and the German subjective school of the 1950s and 60s, to which he actively contributed. Often a pretext for formal and poetic exploration, his photographic subjects, tinged with humor, go beyond a classical representation of reality. He brings an experimental, artistic approach to bear on daily life, a man at work, an urban landscape, a nude or a self-portrait.

With a reference to the current exhibition "Roger Ballen: Enigma" at the gallery, a few strong works will be presented. Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950, but since 1982 he has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he is a major artist of the contemporary scene. After studying geology, Ballen got his doctorate in mining economics in 1981 and began working in mineral exploration. It was in 1983, however, armed with his camera, that he began a completely different activity, digging – as he puts it – into the layers of his own inner life and piercing the external surface of a poor and deeply rural country far removed from the clichés of a strong, modern South Africa, to reveal visual and cultural anomalies that were signs of a dying culture.