9 maggio - 2 settembre 2012, Bonn (DE)
Kunstmuseum Bonn is showing the first retrospective in a German museum of an American photographer who today is legendary. Already in the early 1970s, Lewis Baltz, born 1945 in Newport Beach, California, arrived on the scene with photos that launched him as an essential groundbreaker on the way to (new) art photography. At the age of 26 with “Tract Houses”, Baltz had his first solo exhibition at the famous New York gallery of Leo Castelli, and remained within its program till the early 1990s. Baltz (as well as Hilla and Bernd Becher) took part in the 1975 epochal exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape”. In view of his clear formal vocabulary, Baltz was initially seen as a documentarist. However, since 1986 and his residency in Paris and Venice, his photography has, at least at first glance, radically changed. Instead of a copious series of small-sized black-and-white photographs, large-scale color photography has since the 1990s replaced them. Nonetheless, thematically, the artist has remained true to himself. The subject is always the coming to terms with urban space, architecture, landscape and ecology, which allows Baltz to emerge as a subtle political artist far removed from eye-catching or confrontational tendencies. Info: www.kunstmuseum-bonn.de