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EXHIBITION | GUSTAV KLUTSIS + VALENTINA KULAGINA at “Love in Times of Revolution” | Kunstforum Vienna | until 31 Jan 2016

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GUSTAV KLUTSIS + VALENTINA KULAGINA at

Love in Times of Revolution | Artist couples of the Russian avant-garde
Kunstforum Wien

14 Oct 2015 – 31 Jan 2016

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Love in Times of Revolution
Artist couples of the Russian avant-garde
14.10.2015 – 31.01.2016

In autumn 2015 the Kunstforum will focus on the ground-breaking achievements of the Russian avant-garde from a new perspective: the artist couple. Equality of status in production and ways of living for men and women artists in the context of the October Revolution (1917) not only eschews the image of the “solitary artistic genius”, but establishes an interconnection of art and life, public and private. Artist couples like Varvara Stepanova and Alexandr Rodchenko, or Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov connected all genres of artistic creativity to the formation of theories and aesthetic action, formulating through their art the political aspiration for a change in life. Although the artist duo could not always realise their ambitions with the corresponding equality of status, and it remained a theoretical construct, this form of life and creativity nevertheless fostered the crystallisation of a society’s gender ideology. The show investigates what work methods and formations of personal and power relationships were developed by the Russian avant-garde and what special structural features of artistic identity, creativity and production were the results. The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow as well as many private lenders are supporting the exhibition with important loans from their collections.

Artist Couples:

Natalia Goncharova & Mikhail Larionov
Varvara Stepanova & Alexandr Rodchenko
Liubov Popova & Alexandr Vesnin
Olga Rosanova & Alexei Kruchenykh
Valentina Kulagina & Gustav Klutsis

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Liebe in Zeiten der Revolution
Künstlerpaare der russischen Avantgarde

14.10.2015 – 31.01.2016

Das Kunstforum beleuchtet im Herbst 2015 die bahnbrechenden Errungenschaften der russischen Avantgarde unter einem neuen Aspekt: dem Künstlerpaar. Gleichberechtigte Produktions- und Lebensformen von Künstlern und Künstlerinnen im Kontext der Oktoberrevolution (1917) unterlaufen nicht nur das Image vom „einsamen künstlerischen Genie“, sondern forcieren auch die Verflechtung von Kunst und Leben, Öffentlichem und Privatem. Künstlerpaare wie Warwara Stepanowa und Alexander Rodtschenko oder Natalja Gontscharowa und Michail Larionow verknüpften sämtliche Sparten künstlerischen Schaffens mit Theoriebildung und ästhetischer Aktion und formulierten über ihre Kunst den politischen Anspruch nach einer Lebensveränderung. Obgleich das künstlerische Duo auch oft nicht entsprechend gleichberechtigt umgesetzt werden konnte und ein theoretisches Konstrukt blieb, kristallisiert sich in dieser Lebens- und Schaffensform doch die Geschlechterideologie einer Gesellschaft heraus. Die Schau geht der Frage nach, welche Arbeitspraxis und Ausprägungen von Beziehungs- und Machtverhältnissen die russische Avantgarde hervorgebracht hat und welche strukturellen Besonderheiten sich daraus im Hinblick auf künstlerische Identität, Kreativität und Produktion ergeben. Die Tretjakow Galerie Moskau und das Staatliches Schtschusew-Museum für Architektur, Moskau sowie zahlreiche private Leihgeber unterstützen die Ausstellung mit zentralen Werken aus ihren Sammlungen.

Künstlerpaare:

Natalja Gontscharowa & Michail Larionow
Warwara Stepanowa & Alexander Rodtschenko
Ljubow Popowa & Alexander Wesnin
Olga Rosanowa & Alexej Krutschonych
Valentina Kulagina & Gustav Klutsis

Modern Experiment, Cabinet Exhibition

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MODERN EXPERIMENTS
Cabinet Exhibition
Valentina Kulagina, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Osamu Shiihara, Elfriede Stegemeyer

September 5th – November 28th, 2015

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Parallel to its “RESET I” exhibition, | PRISKA PASQUER will be showcasing a cabinet exhibition of modernist works in its new rooms.
The exhibition is to feature selected works from the 1920s and 1930s by Russian, Japanese and German artists.

The 1920s and 1930s were characterised by political, economic and cultural upheaval of a radical nature. The artists responded to these changing times by taking a broader, experimental approach to working with visual media. In 1931, Walter Benjamin described the increasing complexity of social reality in photography as follows:

“Less than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality […]. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. […] Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.”

The spectrum of the exhibited works ranges from the surreal and abstract works of Osamu Shiihara to two complex photomontages by El Lissitzky, created in 1928 for the “Pressa” press exhibition in Cologne. Also on display are two sketches for a political poster and book cover by Valentina Kulagina, distorted buildings by Elfriede Stegemeyer and also a photogram by Alexander Rodchenko.

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Neben der „RESET I“ Ausstellung zeigt | PRISKA PASQUER in den neuen Räumen ein Kabinettausstellung mit Werken der Moderne.
Ausgewählt wurden Arbeiten der 1920er und 1930er Jahren von Künstlern aus der USSR, Japan und Deutschland.

Die 20er und 30er Jahren zeichnen sich durch radikale Umbrüche in Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur aus. Auf diese Epoche des Wandels reagierten die Künstler mit einem erweiterten, experimentellen Umgang in den Bildmedien. Walter Benjamin beschrieb 1931 die Verarbeitung der zunehmende Komplexität der gesellschaftlichen Wirklichkeit in der Fotografie wie folgt:

„Weniger denn je [sagt] eine einfache Wiedergabe der Realität etwas über die Realität aus […]. Eine Photographie der Kruppwerke oder der A.E.G. ergibt beinahe nichts über diese Institute. […] Es ist also tatsächlich etwas aufzubauen, etwas Künstliches, Gestelltes.“

Die Bandbreite der ausgestellten Arbeiten reicht von surrealen und abstrakten Objekten von Osamu Shiihara bis zu zwei komplexen Fotomontagen von El Lissitzky, die 1928 anlässlich der Kölner Messe „Pressa“ entstanden sind. Gezeigt werden weiterhin zwei zeichnerische Entwürfe für ein politisches Poster und Buchcover von Valentina Kulagina, verfremdete technische Bauwerken von Elfriede Stegemeyer und auch ein Fotogramm von Alexander Rodchenko.

EXPERIMENT – LIFE – POLITICS | Bauhaus Photography x Russian Avant-Garde

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EXPERIMENT – LIFE – POLITICS
Bauhaus Photography X Russian Avant-garde

March 2nd – May 14th, 2013

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Mit der Ausstellung “EXPERIMENT – LIFE – POLITICS” präsentiert die Galerie Priska Pasquer Fotografien aus der Zeit zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen, die als eine der bedeutendsten in der Entwicklung der Fotografie gilt. Während in Deutschland Bauhaus-Künstler vor allem Ende der 20er Jahre die Fotografie unter dem Schlagwort des „Neuen Sehens“ als Experimentierfeld nutzten, wurde das Medium in Russland zum Ausdruck politscher Veränderungen und gesellschaftlicher Idealvorstellungen.

Gezeigt werden Fotografien und Fotocollagen aus den Jahren 1919 bis 1939, unter anderem von T. Lux Feininger, Grit Kallin-Fischer, Alexander Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis und Valentina Kulagina.

In der Umbruchszeit nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg experimentierten Künstler mit einer neuen Formensprache, die das zeitgemäße Verlangen nach einer gesellschaftlichen Neudefinition widerspiegelten. Die drastischen soziopolitischen Veränderungen, die durch den Untergang der Monarchien und den revolutionären Bestrebungen ausgelöst wurden, führten zu einer neuen kollektiven Wahrnehmung der Realität. Diese konnte durch das von vielen Zeitgenossen als demokratisch definierte Medium der Fotografie, das sich technisch zu einem dynamischen Bildaufzeichnungsgerät entwickelt hatte, dokumentiert werden. Alexander Rodchenko zum Beispiel nutzte die Kamera, um den in der Ausstellung gezeigten “Puschkin-Platz” aus einer ungewöhnlich schrägen Vogelperspektive abzulichten.

Die enge Verbindung zwischen öffentlichem Ausdruck und privatem Lebensweg demonstrieren die ausgestellten Werke des Künstlerpaars Gustav Klutsis und Valentina Kulagina, das sich der Entwicklung der Propagandakunst verschrieben hatte. Gustav Klutsis, der 1935 sein Manuskript “Das Recht auf ein Experiment” im selben Jahr begann, in dem Walter Benjamin seinen bekannten Aufsatz “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” schrieb, nutzte neben extremen Perspektiven die Fotomontage, um soziopolitische Ziele der Öffentlichkeit näherzubringen.

Auch in den Werken seiner Lebensgefährtin Valentina Kulagina kommen dieselben Verfahrensweisen zum Einsatz. Dass die politische Dimension der Fotografien von Klutsis-Kulagina nicht zuletzt auf ihrem privaten Lebensweg fußten, verdeutlichen Bilder wie Klutsis’ “Selbstporträt”, in dem sich der Künstler als konzentrierter Dokumentarist seiner Zeit präsentiert.

In den Anfangsjahren des Bauhaus nahm die Fotografie vornehmlich die Rolle als ein dienendes Medium ein, das vor allem dazu genutzt wurde, die am Bauhaus entstandenen Arbeiten zu dokumentieren. Schüler wie Erich Consemüller fotografierten zum Beispiel ihre Vorkursarbeiten. Unter dem Einfluss des Bauhaus-Lehrers Laszlo Moholy-Nagy blühte um 1927 die Fotografie bei Bauhausschülern auf. Sie begannen mit dem Medium zu experimentieren und nahmen dabei Einflüsse des von Moholy-Nagy propagierten „Neuen Sehens“ als auch solche von den verschiedenen Avantgarde-Strömungen wie Surrealismus und Konstruktivismus auf. Die Ausstellung zeigt z. B. eine abstrakte Objektstudie von Piet Zwart von 1931, Inszenierungen menschlicher Rollenspiele von T. Lux Feininger mit extremen Licht- und Schattenspielen oder Porträts von Grit Kallin-Fischer, die aus ungewöhnlichen Perspektiven Momente des tiefen Nachsinnens und der Konzentration zeigen.

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With the exhibition EXPERIMENT – LIFE – POLITICS, Galerie Priska Pasquer presents photographs from the period between the two world wars, which is regarded as a key development phase for photography. While Bauhaus artists in Germany were using photography primarily in the late 1920s as an experimental field under the catchphrase of the “New Vision”, the medium in Russia evolved to become an expression of political changes and social ideals.

The exhibition will feature photographs and photo collages from the years 1919 to 1939 among others by T. Lux Feininger, Grit Kallin-Fischer, Alexander Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina.

During the tumultuous years that followed the First World War, artists experimented with new forms of expression that echoed the contemporary desire to redefine society. The dramatic social-political upheaval that was triggered by declining monarchies and rising revolutionary movements led to a new collective perception of reality. Artists found that it was possible to document these events using photography, which many contemporaries defined as a democratic medium, and which had technologically advanced to become a dynamic tool for recording images. Alexander Rodchenko, for instance, used his camera to photograph “Pushkin Square” from an unusually oblique bird’s-eye perspective, as can be seen in the exhibition.

The close connection between public expression and private lives is demonstrated by the exhibited works of the artistic couple Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina, who had devoted themselves to the development of propaganda art. Klutsis, who began working on the manuscript for his book “The Right for an Experiment” in 1935, the same year in which Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, used extreme perspectives along with photomontage to convey his social-political objectives to the general public.

The same approach can also be found in the works of his wife, Valentina Kulagina. Images such as Klutsis’ “Self-portrait”, in which the artist presents himself as a dedicated documentarian of his day and age, demonstrate that the political dimension of the photographs of Klutsis-Kulagina was also rooted in their private lives.

In the early Bauhaus years, photography was primarily employed as a medium to document designs that had been created at the school. Students such as Erich Consemueller, for example, took photos of their preliminary course work. In 1927, under the influence of Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, photography blossomed among the students. They began to experiment with the medium, incorporating the influences of the New Vision propagated by Moholy-Nagy, along with diverse avant-garde movements such as Surrealism and Constructivism. The exhibition includes an abstract design study by Piet Zwart from 1931, interpretations of human role plays by T. Lux Feininger with extreme interplays of light and shadow, and portraits by Grit Kallin-Fischer that show moments of deep contemplation and concentration viewed from unusual angles.

GUSTAV KLUTSIS AND VALENTINA KULAGINA, A Revolutionary Portrait

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A REVOLUTIONARY PORTRAIT
Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina

January 23rd – March 9th, 2010
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Galerie Priska Pasquer is pleased to exhibit photographs and photomontages by the artist couple Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina. Gustav Klutsis was a pioneering Russian Constructivist artist, designer, photographer, and photomontagist. Alongside the works of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and Sergei Senkin, Klutsis’s work stands as one of the strongest examples of the post-abstract Soviet avant-garde. His wife and colleague Valentina Kulagina was an innovative poster, book, and exhibition designer. The exhibition explores the creative partnership between the two artists.
Throughout their life together, Klutsis and Kulagina saw the camera as a tool that permitted experimentation and creative exchange. By the mid-1920s, their public projects entirely relied on photography. However, being a tool of contextual precision, the camera was also a channel through which Klutsis was able to escape from time to time the immediacy of the Soviet context. Klutsis’s cropping of the environment in which he repeatedly photographed Kulagina, situate her portraits in the lineage of international modernist production. In contrast, Kulagina photographed Klutsis at the moments that most highlighted the Soviet context. For example, she depicted him in a military uniform during his attendance of the Moscow military-political courses in 1930.
Large ambitions that Klutsis invested in his camera had to do with his new commitment to take documentary photographs, specifically for use in photomontages. His accumulation of an archive comprised of photographs that documented public and private activities begins around 1924, and establishes the simultaneity in Klutsis’s predilection toward public and private photography. The practice of making rather than borrowing photographs for public photomontages positioned Klutsis apart from other Soviet photomontage practitioners. Like Aleksandr Rodchenko, Klutsis took portraits of friends and family in the early 1920s. But Rodchenko was not eager to utilize his examples in political imagery, instead finding a place for them in his commercial advertisement. Klutsis on the other hand, dared to place shots of his friends and relatives on a worktable alongside his street photography and mix family and leaders portraits in his montages.
Klutsis began to experiment with the modernist techniques of double exposure and the photogram around 1929 primarily for avoiding awkward superimpositions that resulted from the cut and paste technique of montage. He created a „private“ double-eyed portrait of Kulagina’s brother Boris that resembles Man Ray’s 1922 portrait of the Marquise Casati, and made several „public“ posters with a double-exposure technique. These kinds of photographic experiments, although common in advanced European photography of the 1920s, were quite rare in the circles of Soviet photographers. Under the influential leadership of Rodchenko, most Soviet avant-garde photographers favored oblique angles and unconventional vantage points. The exhibition includes collages that record the Dadaistic performances enacted in Klutsis’s and Kulagina’s apartment on Miasnitskaia Street, in the famous building of VKhUTEMAS, and provide a body of rare images that are associated with the avant-garde circle of artists, poets, and graphic designers.

GUSTAV KLUTSIS
Following two years of art school in his native Latvia, Gustav Klutsis (1895 – 1938) was drafted into the Russian Army, and participated in the 1917 overthrow of the tsar. In 1919, Klutsis resumed his art schooling in Moscow in the studios of Konstantin Korovin and Kazimir Malevich. Acclaimed for his spatial constructions, as well for his designs of practical structures like kiosks, tribunes, and radio-orators, Klutsis became a professor of color theory at the constructivist school VKhUTEMAS (Higher State Artistic-Technical Workshops) in 1924. In addition to being an accomplished constructivist, by the early 1920s, Klutsis had become a pioneering developer of photomontage. Klutsis applied photomontage to innovative designs for posters, magazines, and books throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the technique was swiftly adopted by other members of the Soviet avant-garde. In addition to being one of the leading practitioners of photomontage, he also participated in debates on the subject, published essays on his theories, and contributed to major exhibitions, including the Internationale Presse-Ausstellung (Pressa) 1928, and Film and Foto, 1929. Alongside the works of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and Sergei Senkin, Klutsis’s work stands as one of the strongest examples of the post-abstract Soviet avant-garde. Although a devoted member of the Communist Party, Klutsis was arrested and detained in 1938, shortly after returning from the Paris World’s Fair, where he designed numerous exhibitions and installed a photomontage frieze that he created for the Soviet pavilion. He was executed three weeks after his arrest.

VALENTINA KULAGINA
In 1920, VKhUTEMAS student Valentina Kulagina (1902-1987) met Klutsis, and the two artists married on February 2, 1921. Throughout the 1920s, she and Klutsis lived in the school’s headquarters, which also housed Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Aleksei Kruchenykh. In 1928, she joined October, an artist’s group whose members included Klutsis (who was in charge of the photomontage section), Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich, and Lissitzky. That same year, she designed parts of the Soviet pavilion of the landmark Pressa exhibition in Cologne. After graduating from VKhUTEMAS, she worked for Izogiz (State Art Publishing House of Art) and VOKS (All-Union Society of Cultural Relations Abroad), receiving domestic and international commissions for poster, exhibition, and book designs. After Klutsis’s arrest and execution in 1938, and until the beginning of World War II in 1941, she was employed as a designer of photomontages for the VSKhV (All-Union Agricultural Exhibition). After the war, she was employed as an official painter and designer. She died in Moscow in 1987.
[Source: Margarita Tupitsyn: Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina. Photography and Montage after Constructivism. International Center of Photography, New York 2004]

An independent curator, critic, and scholar, Dr. Margarita Tupitsyn is the author of numerous essays and books on twentieth-century and contemporary Russian and Western art and photography.

Selected exhibitions and publications:
– Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present. Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1989
– Glaube, Hoffnung, Anpassung. Soviet Art 1928-1945. Museum Folkwang, Essen 1995
– The Soviet Photograph, 1924-1937. Yale 1996
– Aleksandr Rodchenko: the New Moscow. München 1998
– El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration. Yale 1999
– Bauhaus: Dessau, Chicago, New York. Museum Folkwang, Essen 2000
– Malevich and Film. Yale, 2002
– Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina. Photography and Montage after Constructivism. International Center of Photography, New York 2004
– Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov and the Moscow Archive of New Art, Museum Serralves, Porto, 2004 (co-authored)
– Gegen Kandinsky / Against Kandinsky. Museum Villa Stuck, München 2007
– Rodchenko & Popova. Defining Constructivism. Tate Modern, London 2009

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Galerie Priska Pasquer is pleased to exhibit photographs and photomontages by the artist couple Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina. Gustav Klutsis was a pioneering Russian Constructivist artist, designer, photographer, and photomontagist. Alongside the works of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and Sergei Senkin, Klutsis’s work stands as one of the strongest examples of the post-abstract Soviet avant-garde. His wife and colleague Valentina Kulagina was an innovative poster, book, and exhibition designer. The exhibition explores the creative partnership between the two artists.
Throughout their life together, Klutsis and Kulagina saw the camera as a tool that permitted experimentation and creative exchange. By the mid-1920s, their public projects entirely relied on photography. However, being a tool of contextual precision, the camera was also a channel through which Klutsis was able to escape from time to time the immediacy of the Soviet context. Klutsis’s cropping of the environment in which he repeatedly photographed Kulagina, situate her portraits in the lineage of international modernist production. In contrast, Kulagina photographed Klutsis at the moments that most highlighted the Soviet context. For example, she depicted him in a military uniform during his attendance of the Moscow military-political courses in 1930.
Large ambitions that Klutsis invested in his camera had to do with his new commitment to take documentary photographs, specifically for use in photomontages. His accumulation of an archive comprised of photographs that documented public and private activities begins around 1924, and establishes the simultaneity in Klutsis’s predilection toward public and private photography. The practice of making rather than borrowing photographs for public photomontages positioned Klutsis apart from other Soviet photomontage practitioners. Like Aleksandr Rodchenko, Klutsis took portraits of friends and family in the early 1920s. But Rodchenko was not eager to utilize his examples in political imagery, instead finding a place for them in his commercial advertisement. Klutsis on the other hand, dared to place shots of his friends and relatives on a worktable alongside his street photography and mix family and leaders portraits in his montages.
Klutsis began to experiment with the modernist techniques of double exposure and the photogram around 1929 primarily for avoiding awkward superimpositions that resulted from the cut and paste technique of montage. He created a „private“ double-eyed portrait of Kulagina’s brother Boris that resembles Man Ray’s 1922 portrait of the Marquise Casati, and made several „public“ posters with a double-exposure technique. These kinds of photographic experiments, although common in advanced European photography of the 1920s, were quite rare in the circles of Soviet photographers. Under the influential leadership of Rodchenko, most Soviet avant-garde photographers favored oblique angles and unconventional vantage points. The exhibition includes collages that record the Dadaistic performances enacted in Klutsis’s and Kulagina’s apartment on Miasnitskaia Street, in the famous building of VKhUTEMAS, and provide a body of rare images that are associated with the avant-garde circle of artists, poets, and graphic designers.

GUSTAV KLUTSIS
Following two years of art school in his native Latvia, Gustav Klutsis (1895 – 1938) was drafted into the Russian Army, and participated in the 1917 overthrow of the tsar. In 1919, Klutsis resumed his art schooling in Moscow in the studios of Konstantin Korovin and Kazimir Malevich. Acclaimed for his spatial constructions, as well for his designs of practical structures like kiosks, tribunes, and radio-orators, Klutsis became a professor of color theory at the constructivist school VKhUTEMAS (Higher State Artistic-Technical Workshops) in 1924. In addition to being an accomplished constructivist, by the early 1920s, Klutsis had become a pioneering developer of photomontage. Klutsis applied photomontage to innovative designs for posters, magazines, and books throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the technique was swiftly adopted by other members of the Soviet avant-garde. In addition to being one of the leading practitioners of photomontage, he also participated in debates on the subject, published essays on his theories, and contributed to major exhibitions, including the Internationale Presse-Ausstellung (Pressa) 1928, and Film and Foto, 1929. Alongside the works of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and Sergei Senkin, Klutsis’s work stands as one of the strongest examples of the post-abstract Soviet avant-garde. Although a devoted member of the Communist Party, Klutsis was arrested and detained in 1938, shortly after returning from the Paris World’s Fair, where he designed numerous exhibitions and installed a photomontage frieze that he created for the Soviet pavilion. He was executed three weeks after his arrest.

VALENTINA KULAGINA
In 1920, VKhUTEMAS student Valentina Kulagina (1902-1987) met Klutsis, and the two artists married on February 2, 1921. Throughout the 1920s, she and Klutsis lived in the school’s headquarters, which also housed Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Aleksei Kruchenykh. In 1928, she joined October, an artist’s group whose members included Klutsis (who was in charge of the photomontage section), Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich, and Lissitzky. That same year, she designed parts of the Soviet pavilion of the landmark Pressa exhibition in Cologne. After graduating from VKhUTEMAS, she worked for Izogiz (State Art Publishing House of Art) and VOKS (All-Union Society of Cultural Relations Abroad), receiving domestic and international commissions for poster, exhibition, and book designs. After Klutsis’s arrest and execution in 1938, and until the beginning of World War II in 1941, she was employed as a designer of photomontages for the VSKhV (All-Union Agricultural Exhibition). After the war, she was employed as an official painter and designer. She died in Moscow in 1987.
[Source: Margarita Tupitsyn: Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina. Photography and Montage after Constructivism. International Center of Photography, New York 2004]

An independent curator, critic, and scholar, Dr. Margarita Tupitsyn is the author of numerous essays and books on twentieth-century and contemporary Russian and Western art and photography.

Selected exhibitions and publications:
– Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present. Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1989
– Glaube, Hoffnung, Anpassung. Soviet Art 1928-1945. Museum Folkwang, Essen 1995
– The Soviet Photograph, 1924-1937. Yale 1996
– Aleksandr Rodchenko: the New Moscow. München 1998
– El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration. Yale 1999
– Bauhaus: Dessau, Chicago, New York. Museum Folkwang, Essen 2000
– Malevich and Film. Yale, 2002
– Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina. Photography and Montage after Constructivism. International Center of Photography, New York 2004
– Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov and the Moscow Archive of New Art, Museum Serralves, Porto, 2004 (co-authored)
– Gegen Kandinsky / Against Kandinsky. Museum Villa Stuck, München 2007
– Rodchenko & Popova. Defining Constructivism. Tate Modern, London 2009

Heinz Hajek-Halke, Gustav Klutsis, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Osamu Shiihara and others, VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE 1920S AND 1930S

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VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE 1920S AND 1930S

Heinz Hajek-Halke, Gustav Klutsis,

El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Osamu Shiihara and others

November 10th, 2000 – January 31st, 2001

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The premiere exhibition of “Vintage Photography of the 1920s and 1930s” on November 9th, 2000 marks the opening of Galerie Priska Pasquer in Cologne. The newly opened gallery located at Goebenstraße 3 offers collectors of fine art photography a first-time opportunity to view a representative sampling of artwork from among the gallery’s stock.

Priska Pasquer’s representation of European photography has enjoyed long-standing success. Previously employed for a number of years at Galerie Rudolf Kicken in Cologne, Ms. Pasquer has since launched out on her own as an art dealer and creative consultant in distinguished international collections. Her exclusive representation of such renowned photographers as El Lissitzky, Gustav Klucis and Heinz Hajek-Halke attests to the authentic caliber of her professional expertise over the years.

The opening of Galerie Priska Pasquer hallmarks its commitment to further enhance the preparation and presentation of photography of the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s. The gallery also plans to introduce an emphatic trend in photography by way of augmenting the prospective repertoire with select works of contemporary art as a rejoinder to the challenge occasioned by the departure of prominent galleries from the Rhineland to Berlin.

Approximately 70 vintage European and Japanese photographs of the 1920s and 1930s are represented in the opening exhibition. The centerpiece of the presentation consists of photomontages by El Lissitzky, including one of his most celebrated works, “The Constructor” (1924). “The Constructor”, which ranks as one of the most significant self-portraits in the 20th century, embodies “the struggle for artistic creativity by combining modern technology with the human intellect” (M. Tupitsyn). Particularly deserving of critical attention are the photomontages “Lenin’s Death Mask” and “Self-portrait” presented on the occasion of the 1928 Pressa Exhibition in Cologne.

Additional Soviet artists, such as Alexander Rodchenko, Gustav Klucis and Max Penson, whose works are also represented in the exhibition, capture in their photography dynamic scenes in public settings and tableaux of crowds, alongside more intimate evocations of the artists’ personal surroundings, as well as working prints and drafts for political posters.

Western European representatives of “New Photography”, who figure among the pioneers of the revolutionary forms of expression of the 1920s and 1930s and whose portraits, objectified forms and experimental photographs are featured in the exhibition, notably include Franz Roh, Umbo, Aenne Biermann and Heinz Hajek-Halke. Photographed stage sets and still lifes by the Italian Futurists Cesare Cerati, Renato di Bosso, Marisa Mori and Ivo Pannaggi round off the high spots of this premiere exhibition.