CHANGING PLACES

Starting in November 2021, the Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken, gives a guest performance at SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen featuring around 250 works from its extensive and outstanding collection of photographs. The beginnings of the Moderne Galerie’s photo collection, which was founded in the 1950s, trace back to a photograph by Otto Steinert, photo pioneer and initiator of the movement “subjective photography.”

The selected works by almost 30 different artists cover the period 1925 to 2015 and offer insights into programmatic developments in the history of photography. Works such as Albert Renger-Patsch’s Krabbenfischerin (Shrimp Fisherwoman) exemplify “New Objectivity” photography from the 1920s onwards. László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms shed light on groundbreaking changes of the “New Vision” movement, which focuses on the artistic potential of the medium and the altered modern world from unusual angles.

After World War II, Otto Steinert and his contemporaries such as Peter Keetman and Toni Schneiders followed these lines of tradition. Their works familiarize visitors with the experimental design interests of the avant-garde group “fotoform” and the style of “subjective fotografie.” Monika von Boch and other students of the Saarbrücker Schule für Kunst und Handwerk continued to develop Steinert’s impulses. In her Weissblechserie (Tin Plate Series), for instance, on which she worked for over ten years, von Boch used various alienating methods. Thus, she transformed two shots of a pile of sheet metal into abstract organic forms.

Boris Becker, Simone Demandt or Hans-Christian Schink – artists of the project Mapping the Museum – provide a glimpse of contemporary trends. In 2014/15 they photographed the Moderne Galerie’s extension wing, which was under construction at the time. Here, they followed different approaches: from documentary-objective to subjective-alienated.