C’era una volta / LUIGI GHIRRI, CHRISTIAN LINDOW, DAAN VAN GOLDEN

11 Sep – 07 Nov, 2020

Mai 36, Zurich

Mai 36 Galerie presents an exhibition featuring works by Luigi Ghirri, Christian Lindow and Daan van Golden – three artists whose estates are represented by the gallery.

Luigi Ghirri (1943 – 1992) started out as a self-taught photographer in 1970 and went on to become one of the leading Italian photographers of the postwar era. He revolutionised Italian photography in the 1970s1990s and his seminal influence on photography still reverberates strongly to this day. While Ghirri endeavoured, on the one hand, to capture everyday things in an unprejudiced light, his images of architecture and landscape, on the other, bear witness to his quest for the very essence of things. He sought forms of expression that reflected the mood of the day, the Italian view of their own land, and the world in general. His photographs convey a longing for a distinctly classical aesthetic, explored in perfectly composed images, and at the same time a counterpoint, often in the form of triste scenarios that he stylised, heightened and condensed into an inimitable visualisation of his viewpoint.

Christian Lindow (1945 – 1990) was born in Altenburg in the former East German state of Thuringia and settled in Bern in the late 1960s. Following on from his geometric sculptures and his work in the field of conceptual photography, he turned his attention to illustrative painting and, before long, began to combine this with processes of concretion, contamination and decay. His use of thick, heavily applied paint and rapid brushstrokes suggest a struggle with the material. At first glance, the rapid and gestural brushwork and the intensely emphatic subjectivity make these works by Lindow seem redolent of German Neo-Expressionism.
Yet the motifs are everyday things that he has chosen precisely because they are neutral in character: a fish on a plate, postcard landscapes of mountaintops and seashores, a curtain. Free of lyricism, focused on content, more laconic than vivacious, Lindow’s unique style is evident in his highly expressive works.

Daan van Golden (1936 – 2017) studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Visual Arts and Technology, where he specialised in painting and graphic design. During an extended stay in Japan, his work evolved into the style that he would retain for the rest of his life. Between 1963 and 1965, he developed a technique using Japanese enamel paints, which he began adapting to create patterns on paper and fabric with meticulous precision, using such materials as tablecloths and packaging materials. On the whole, van Golden looked to his everyday surroundings and personal experiences, translating these in his own way into an artistic context that united life and art. He would create several variations on the same theme, in different colours
and dimensions, which took on an existence of their own and became autonomous motifs through his form of appropriation. Later, in similar vein, he created variations and abstractions of enlarged details from
paintings by such artists as Jackson Pollock and Henri Matisse as well as photographic works and silkscreens.