© Rineke Dijkstra: Almerisa, Wormer, The Netherlands, June 23, 1996 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Landes Museum Bonn LVR Colmantstr. 14-16 D-53115 Bonn Allemagne
Taking 15 artistic perspectives as cases in point, the AGES – Portraits of Growing Older exhibition brings together a variety of, serially arranged, portrait projects. The artists from the USA, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Russia, Austria, Poland/France and Switzerland were all born between 1923 and 1979. This allows for the work of several generations of artists to enter into a fascinating dialogue with each other against an international backdrop. The main focus is on photography alongside additional filmic approaches as well as painting.
Richard Avedon: Jacob Israel Avedon, father of Richard Avedon, Sarasota, Florida, 1969–1973
Jacob Israel Avedon, Sarasota, Florida, August 25, 1973
© The Richard Avedon Foundation. Used by permission
The artists chosen for this exhibition photographed one and the same person, sometimes themselves, regularly and frequently. No matter whether it is Richard Avedon (1923–2004), who captured pictures of his seriously ill father several times during the last years of his life, or Nicholas Nixon (*1947), who has portrayed his wife with her three sisters every year for more than three decades. These exemplary works, which have already found their place among the classics of photography, achieve their fascination not least through the fact that they were created rigorously over an extended period. They make it clear that the systematic repetition and quasi scientific-artistic methods are the principal factors that make a comparison possible which provides us with an understanding of – and therefore insight into – fundamental, universally valid structures.
Andreas Mader: Benno und Pia, 1997, aus: Die Tage Das Leben
© Andreas Mader
The Landesgalerie Linz and Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung in Cologne, with Stefanie Hoch, Martin Hochleitner, Gabriele Hofer-Hagenauer, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl and Claudia Schubert as the team of curators, worked together on developing the AGES project for the past two years. This is the seventh undertaking that the two institutions have either participated in or initiated against the background of their special interest in documentary photography since 2006.
A catalogue, including a text by the Austrian writer Franzobel, is being published by the Edition Fotohof, Salzburg, to accompany the AGES – Portraits of Growing Older exhibition.
Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters, 2011
© Nicholas Nixon, Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid
