June 5 - September 15, 2019
Arts Foyer
Maximilianstrasse 53, 80538 Munich
Contact: 089/2160 2244
Open daily from 9.00-19.00
Free admission
From the Kunstfoyer website -
Our second exhibition in Kunstfoyer 2019 is dedicated to a crossover between the media of painting and photography. Saul Leiter (* 1923 in Pittsburgh - 2013 New York City) has only recently experienced the deserved appreciation as one of the leading pioneers of color photography. Already in 1946, far ahead of the representatives of the "New Color Photography" of the 1970s (William Eggleston, Stephen Shore), he was one of the first to use color photography, which was despised by artists at the time. Early on, he discovered his passion for the arts and began painting as a teenager in the late 1940s. His family did not support his artistic interests because his father, a recognized Talmudic rabbi and scholar, had always hoped that his son would one day follow him as a rabbi in the family tradition.
Saul Leiter has always understood himself as a painter and photographer. Both in his painting and in his photographs he tends to abstraction and flatness. Passers-by are not taken into the picture as individuals, but as blurred aesthetic color impulses, superimposed by panes or between house walls and traffic signs. The transitions between abstraction and figurative in his paintings and photographs are almost seamless. He finds his motifs such as shop windows, passers-by, cars, signs and umbrellas in the immediate vicinity. The blurring in detail, the blurring of movement and the reduction of depth of field, the compensation or deliberate withdrawal of necessary light and the alienation through window views and reflections. All this merges into the color language of a semi-real, semi-abstract urban space. It is the work of an almost undiscovered modern master of color photography of the 1940s and 1950s.
The exhibition is a cooperation with the House of Photography / Deichtorhallen Hamburg and is curated by Ingo Taubhorn and Brigitte Woischnik.