On the occasion of Berlin Gallery Weekend, beginning April 27, Kicken Berlin will be exhibiting a selection of about thirty works by Diane Arbus. Arbus’s work is considered seminal to photography in the second half of the twentieth century; no other photographer approached her subjects so directly or openly. Arbus’s portraits are characterized by her fascination and wonderment with those unique phenomena of everyday life, which she captured on her ‘vertical journey’ through American society between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Kicken Berlin presents the small collection of Diane Arbus as a prelude to the extensive, two-hundred-work exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau from June 21.
The exhibited works reflect the photographer’s mandate to study people, their actions and comportment, in the most diverse public and private spaces. This includes life on the street and in public parks, where so many different people encounter one another. The dramatic Puerto Rican Woman with a Beauty Mark and Woman with a Veil on Fifth Avenue are just as much a part of the body of work as a woman on a park bench - Woman with a Locket in Washington Square Park - or the smoking boys in Central Park.
While these people show their everyday faces, the subjects at any number of social events and amusements such as at gallery openings, balls, parties, fairs, and even very simple gatherings of friends in private apartments emanate a representative or even glamorous air - but upon closer observation seem almost fragile: Lady in a Tiara at a Ball, Four People at a Gallery Opening, A Woman in a Bird Mask, and Four Russian Midget Friends in Living Room. Images such as A House on a Hill, Hollywood, and of funk legend James Brown at Home in Curlers depict the life of the stage - and grant a look behind the scenes. The figure of the transvestite, in its many different manifestations such as in Seated Man in Bra and Stockings or Transvestite at a Drag Ball, brings questions of representation and self-image to a head.
With portraits by Christer Strömholm, Ed van der Elsken, and Diane Arbus’ teacher, Lisette Model, from the 1940s to the 1960s, Kicken II will provide a companion show to complement Diane Arbus’s approach to her human counterparts. Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken visualized the existentialist attitude toward life in the 1950s. He focuses on individual existence and its dreams within an often disenchanted reality; like Arbus, he also pictures outcasts, bohemians, and transvestites. The latter are also a key subject to Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm, who created a strikingly empathic and personal series on transvestites between 1954 and 1965 in the Paris entertainment district of Montmartre. His images reveal a microcosm of the universal human state of mind: the nightlife documentary and informal portraits of transvestites, transsexuals, and prostitutes of Place Blanche attest in a warm, personal way the quest for self-identity. Lisette Model, too, focuses mainly on the human portrait. She found her subjects in nightlife and in pleasure grounds, often on the fringes of society, but also at the opera or jazz clubs. Model often angled her camera slightly upward, getting close to her subjects and thus revealing her own astonishment and passion in view of the common marvels of the obvious world.
In the scope of Berlin Gallery Weekend, Kicken will also launch a temporary project - Kicken@Cruba - from April 27 to 29. Located at Cruba fashion and art space in the heart of the Scheunenviertel’s gallery district on Auguststrasse, the presentation focuses on the subject of materiality, surfaces and haptics in contemporary works by Götz Diergarten, Charles Fréger, Jitka Hanzlová, Helga Paris, Hans Christian Schink and Alfred Seiland. Diergarten pictures the facades of public spaces in his strictly documentary and conceptual work with an eye for detail and color, while Schink embraces landscape in a similar conceptual way. Fréger depicts the rich and imaginative representation of European folklore in his Wilder Mann figures, and Hanzlová revels in the deeply sensual aspects of her portrait series like Cotton Rose and Leonardo. Helga Paris pictured female workers at former GDR Treff-Modelle textile industry, and Alfred Seiland studies fabrics and patterns in both dresses and nature. Hans Christian Schink depicts in his Fläming landscapes natural and man-made structures as organic unity.
