Undressed – Female Nude Photography in a highly differentiated way

If we believed, at the latest since the 1970s, that the times when nude photography had an immoral and even subversive reputation were finally over, our digital present is once again faced with the question of what images are allowed to do and what they are not, when on the one hand all conceivable sexual varieties of the porn industry are only two mouse clicks away, on the other hand, uncovered female breasts are recognised and deleted by social media algorithms even if they are world-famous classical works of art that have been part of the canon of every educated citizen since their creation, without anyone taking serious offence in earlier times.

From the very beginning, nude photography was characterised by an erotic subtext, which, depending on the function and intention of the respective photographic image, was sometimes more, sometimes less clearly formulated, sometimes receding behind the motif and sometimes ostentatiously pushing itself into the foreground. But the human body first and foremost confronted photographers with problems of form that had to be overcome technically and artistically. As in the other photographic subject areas, the range of nude photography since the 1920s has oscillated between staging and realism, the two poles only seemingly sharply demarcated from each other, characterised by numerous overlaps and contradictions, but always with an inherent artistic ambition.

The works in this exhibition approach the female nude in a highly differentiated way:
Josef Karl's nude photographs are often characterised by provocative poses of the models, but the stagings, which are always created in close cooperation with the sitters, refer to their sometimes problematic lives, enriched by official documents or personal DNA, whereby the artist wants to "underline the uniqueness and authenticity of each person [...]".

Both Magdalena Wosinska and Korbinian Vogt focus on the staging of the body - in Magdalena Wosinska's case: her own body - in the great outdoors. However, while Vogt is concerned with the visualisation of the sensual experience of nature, with the contrast between dramatic mountain scenery and bodily vulnerability, Wosinska celebrates the American dream of unlimited freedom in her photographs, including a sometimes ironically broken sex-drugs-and-rock'n'roll attitude.

Loreen Hinz, on the other hand, can be located in the tradition of pictorialism: Her pictorial creations refer to the stylistic canon of portrait painting from the 16th to the 19th century, but without imitating any particular style or even artist in individual cases. The results are photographs of graceful female beauties, integrated into a dreamlike, unreal ambience without any actual spatial definition, so that, in combination with deliberate blurring, an impression of dematerialisation and transcendence is created. Alexa Meade interprets the model's body with painterly means on the body itself.

The four other artists in the exhibition - Julian Baker, Shu-Wei Huang, Aliocha Merker and Sasha Stamatowski - are united by the common model Vincent Littlehat. In all their projects, which are mostly conceptual in nature, Vincent claims a decisive share in the image-creating process by thinking through her relationship to the viewer, bringing him close with the help of the camera lens or assigning him the place of the distanced observer.