Alfred Jensen – A.R.Penck. Geometrie und Theorie in Farbe und Form

Our next exhibition, Farbe und Geometrie (Color and Geometry), will begin on 26 March and feature eleven works: four by Alfred Jensen (1903-81) and eight by A.R. Penck (1939-2017). Both artists are known for their abstract pieces which combine complex concepts with social-philosophical ideas.
 
Jensen’s work was focused on mathematical theories, numeral systems, Goethe’s teachings on color or the Mayan calendar. His drawings and paintings are considered representations of cosmic orders and philosophical ideas.
 
In the eight ink drawings from the „Serie E“, Penck uses simple forms such as circles, squares and triangles. Upon closer inspection, all of the drawings are divided by a central caesura. The tension between art and society and Penck’s occupation with the political realities of his time, like the division of Germany, are palpable.
 
The exhibition places select works by both artists into a dialogue, between color and form, geometry and their theories and demonstrates their clear line strokes and strong graphic presence..
 

 
 
Exhibition Dates:
 
March 26 – May 7, 2024
 
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
 
 

The works in the exhibition are for sale. Please contact us for availability and prices.

 

 
 

Antonius Höckelmann

DANIEL BLAU, at the Maximilianstraße gallery, is pleased to present a new exhibition of works on paper by the extraordinary German artist Antonius Höckelmann (1937-2000). The exhibition opens today, Thursday 15th February.
 
Höckelmann studied sculpture, from 1951 until 1957, with Karl Hartung in Berlin, concentrating especially on wood as a material. It was only a gradual process of self-discovery that led him to drawing. His breakthrough came in 1977, with his participation in documenta 6; he returned to Kassel for documenta 7 in 1982, cementing his position in the contemporary art scene with numerous exhibitions throughout the decade, often alongside fellow artists like Georg Baselitz and A.R. Penck. Many of his works resist easy classification, bringing the disciplines of sculpture and painting together in one single piece; he will often combine materials both traditional and strikingly modern, like wood and bronze or Styrofoam and aluminum, in the same sculpture, before covering it in color as well.
 
The exhibition in the Maximilianstraße gallery spans a vibrant arc of creative years from 1964 until the early 1980s, featuring exclusively works on paper. Höckelmann here employs pastel, charcoal, graphite, and watercolor to conjure forth a host of sculptural and abstract shapes, of pastoral figures and creatures of fable and fantasy. There are echoes of Mannerism and the Baroque, too, lingering motifs from the artist’s time in Italy, and his intense study of those artistic eras. His compositions, charged with an electric sense of tension and suspense, burst with movement and dynamic surfaces, spirals and vegetative forms unfolding the cosmos of his drawings to the audience before them.
 
The exhibition will run until March 26th, featuring an overview of Höckelmann’s work on paper. The twelve pieces on display are excellent representatives of his art’s power and vitality, each conveying in its own way the power coursing through all his work, in its handling of color and form, of the figurative and the abstract.

 
 
Exhibition Dates:
 
February 15 – March 26, 2024
 
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
 
 

The works in the exhibition are for sale. Please contact us for availability and prices.

 

 
 

No Place for a Vacation

DANIEL BLAU is pleased to share that this year’s winter exhibition in the gallery on Maximilanstraße will be “No Place for a Vacation”, a selection of twenty-one NASA- and underwater photographs from the mid-to-late 20th century.

 
 
Exhibition Dates:
 
December 7, 2023 – January 23, 2024 | extended until February 9, 2024
 
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
 
 

The works in the exhibition are for sale. Please contact us for availability and prices.

 

 
 

David Byrd

DANIEL BLAU, at its Maximilianstraße gallery, is pleased to present an exhibition of seven exceptional paintings by American painter David Byrd, spanning a period from the 1980s to 2008.
 
Byrd was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1926. He joined the Merchant Marines as a teenager and was subsequently drafted into the US Army during the Second World War. His service as an artilleryman permitted him to take advantage of the G.I. Bill for his studies, which he briefly pursued at the Dauphin School of Art in Philadelphia before transferring to the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York City.
 
His academics behind him, Byrd spent most of the 1950s working a variety of jobs, all of which had one thing in common: a minimal demand on Byrd’s time, allowing him plenty of opportunity to paint. He worked as a janitor and a postman, at a bar and a cinema, before, in 1958, taking work as an orderly in the psychiatric ward of the Veterans Administration Medical Hospital in Montrose, New York. Over the following thirty years, Byrd took his experiences there and, very quietly, immortalized them. The unusual images of poignant potency he created, imbued with the disquieting atmosphere of the institution, have become his best-known work. Byrd’s very particular, distinctive style of painting – simple, flat shapes, executed in pale pastel tones – is employed with a keen sensitivity and melancholy tenderness in the artist’s recollections of the patients he has seen, of their inner struggles with the trauma of war and its aftermaths.
 
Byrd’s genius lends to all of his paintings, including those depicting people and encounters outside of the hospital, a very particular aura; through his handling of faces and their features, and the overall simplicity of his compositions, he evokes a sense of tension and psychological separation between subject and viewer. Nevertheless, a certain warmth is betrayed in his more sober scenes: his compassion is unmistakable in the softness of his small, countless brushstrokes, in the visible care and sensitivity with which the artist made them.
 
Following his retirement in 1988, Byrd bought a house in Sidney Center, New York, where he lived in relative seclusion until his death in 2013. The first professional exhibition of his work had taken place earlier that same year, at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle; his character and lifestyle meant that the artist rarely showed his art to others, so it was only thanks to a happenstance discovery by a neighbor, and only in 2012, that it came before the public eye at all. A host of exhibitions followed, at various galleries and institutions including the West Point Museum. Today, the artist’s estate is represented by the Anton Kern Gallery, where his work continues to be exhibited.
 
The seven works currently displayed at DANIEL BLAU cover a long period of Byrd’s creative career, so differences in Byrd’s visual language when dealing with different themes can be quite clearly recognized. “Woman in Car, Filling Station,” from around 1981, distinguishes itself in the artist’s attention to a setting’s background and subject’s surroundings when working with genre scenes. What results in that case is a wider range of colors and a fuller composition when compared, for instance, to portraiture like 2008’s “Man.” The lone figure in that painting braces himself against the cold, facing away from the viewer in apparent reverie; he is all that occupies the small canvas. This sort of visual minimalism is typical of Byrd’s hospital paintings, which he continued to create, from the vast halls of his memory, long after retirement.
 
 
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Exhibition Dates:
 
November 2, 2023 – January 16, 2024
 
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
 
 

The works in the exhibition are for sale. Please contact us for availability and prices.

 

 
 

Daido Moriyama

DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present an exceptional exhibition of 23 new paintings Japanese artist Daido Moriyama based on photos he took in 1971 in New York City. (b.1938, Osaka, Japan).
 
Over the course of his 60-year long career, the renowned Japanese artist, Moriyama, has documented his immediate surroundings, analyzing the society of post-war Japan along the way. He has significantly changed the way we perceive photography – and even called the very medium into question himself.
 
His diverse œvre is shaped by his many publications and largely comprises traditional photographs, installations and silkscreen prints. With focus on bold contrast, Moriyama’s unmistakeable visual language was influenced by Andy Warhol.
 
Moriyama’s work between 1968 and 1972 is characterized by depth and density, the result of his talent feeding off the cultural pulse of the time. Photography was omnipresent, both in the press and in advertising.
 
These 2023 works in bronze and black are devoted to the themes of mass media, consumer society and everyday life and are based on early photographs taken by the artist in New York City in 1971. Of the city, Moriyama said:
 
“My favourite city: New York. I have no doubt that I like it even more than Tokyo. Somewhere hidden in it is a strange kindness and sadness, Sometimes when I want to remember the person I love, I think of the lights of New York. Since I’m afraid to travel by plane, it’s a great pity that even if I wanted to, I can’t just fly there right now.“
 
During his time there, Moriyama manipulated his camera such that each negative image could take two single exposures, each half the size of a regular 35mm negative. Now, these pairs of images are combined onto single canvases, creating a kind of “multifaceted reality” typical of Moriyama’s style from this period, which embodied the concept of are, bure, bokeh – meaning grainy, blurred and out of focus.

 
 
 
Exhibition Dates:
 
September 5 – October 12, 2023
 
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
 
 

The works in the exhibition are for sale. Please contact us for availability and prices.

 

 
 

Art Basel Review

2023

 

Exhibition: July 18 – August 31, 2023
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All illustrations are available for purchase. Prices upon request.

 

 

 

George Grosz

Drawings 1913 – 1916

 

Exhibition: March 7 – April 18, 2023 ! Extended until June 15, 2023 !
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All illustrations are available for purchase. Prices upon request.

 

 

 

NASA photographs

The unbelievable happened in 1969. A spacecraft crewed by humans touched down on the moon. Even now, the moon landing, and the missions into space that led up to and succeeded it, retain their fascination for us. A curation of high-quality images, both in color and in black-and-white, are presented here as kaleidoscopic insight into the NASA missions of the late 1960s and ‘70s they document. It could be that even the photo-enthusiast public sees little special, today, in space photography, overwhelmed as it is by countless satellites sending back high-resolution glimpses into the cosmos.
If we cast our thoughts back some 60 years, though, NASA’s photographs appear again in new light: the surface of the moon recorded by man, the earth photographed for the first time from that lunar surface, heavily historic and phenomenal images. From a scientific perspective, of course, these missions, of an era already receding into memory, gained mankind a wealth of new information and ways of understanding the universe around us. The stillness, though, the endless quiet of these photographs, the play of light and shadow on another world and beyond our ken, the colors glistening off the horizons of other planets and into boundless space – these are artworks, pure, and fascinating moments in the history of photography.

 

Exhibition: January 10 – February 23, 2023
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request.

 

 

 

Hortus Magicus

Hortus Magicus, the new studio exhibition from DANIEL BLAU, is devoted to one of artistic photography’s first true genres: landscape. From some of the earliest, often anonymous photographic studies, though monumental 20th-century travel scenes, to the famous flower Polaroids of Araki, Hortus Magicus brings together twenty-three outstanding photographic witnesses to the magic of nature and the enchanting simplicity of a lens turned to the unbuilt world.
 
Emerging trends and tendencies in art photography of the mid-nineteenth century encouraged an exploration of and head-on engagement with new themes. The depiction of nature and landscape had, up until this point, remained largely reserved for the painter, but increased involvement with and interest in the world beyond ever-more industrializing cities opened a place among the arts that photography was perfectly positioned to fill. “Barbizon Tree Study,” by Charles Bodmer, illustrates this shift perfectly: the most essential elements of its design show a direct line and relationship back to techniques of landscape painting, to the immediate engagement with nature that define the teachings of the Barbizon school.
 
Especially impressive as testimonies to the mid-nineteenth century’s drive towards discovery are the two photographs that compromise Felice Beato’s “Tōkaidō Road.” At the time, photographs that felt truly ‘authentic’ were considered revolutionary: the difference between a photograph made in the studio and reworked and retouched there afterwards, and a photograph taken outdoors and left to speak for itself on its own merits, was clearly noticeable. Beato’s insistence on the later approach is what makes him today be considered among the first true documentary photographers. Japan exerted a particular fascination upon him. As the main connection between Kyoto, the imperial capital, and Edo (now Tokyo), the capital of the Tokugawa shoguns, the road known as Tōkaidō played an important role in the history, literature, and art of Japan. Beato’s photographs and accompanying captions explore the famous ancient highway through the lens of the living history and culture of Beato’s own time.
 
Ansel Adam’s large-format photograph of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite National Park bears a special defining aesthetic about itself. Adams, internationally renowned landscape photographer and photo writer, experienced with a wide variety of cameras and regularly experimenting with new processes and approaches, was a founding member of one of the most forward-looking photography collectives in the United States – called f/64 – and an influential representative of the style known as straight or pure photography. Adams sought in nature visual echoes to his own intuition; in this vivid, sharply detailed photograph, he allows the massive summit of Sentinel Rock to fill nearly the entire image, seeming somehow cradled there even in its cragged immensity.
 
The color Polaroids of Nobuyoshi Araki, undoubtably among the contemporary world’s most important photographic practitioners, complete our exhibition. Araki’s unique, intimate images of flowers in close detail reflect the forms and shapes of an ideal natural order, hinting towards the similarities and relationships we might all sense in our own human bodies.

 

Exhibition: Temporarily closed due to construction work July 14 – September 13, 2022 / by appointment only
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request.
 
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Markus Lüpertz

 

Exhibition: May 19 – June 28, 2022
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send your inquiry via button below