Albrecht Fuchs, John Baldessari, Los Angeles 2004 I. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021.
Albrecht Fuchs
Album – Portraits 1989–2021
August 29–November 21, 2021
Leopold-Hoesch-Museum
Hoeschplatz 1
52349 Dueren
Germany
The exhibition Album – Portraits 1989–2021 is a comprehensive show of works by the Cologne-based artist Albrecht Fuchs. His conceptual work is dedicated to the photographic portrait and for more than three decades now Albrecht Fuchs has documented the contemporary art scene by showing colleagues in their personal environment. The people portrayed belong to different generations of artists. Several persons have been portrayed at different moments of their careers and at different times. In addition to his artist colleagues, Albrecht Fuchs also portrays gallery owners, collectors and museum directors, actors and actresses and politicians. The result is concise images of the respective personalities, conveyed through the perception of the photographic portrait, which are characterized by intensity and concentration. At the same time, they maintain a distance that leaves room for the specific individuality of the counterpart. Looking back on more than 30 years of photographic work, which also includes book projects and magazine works, the exhibition opens up a panorama of Western contemporary art, as it developed from Cologne and later found a new centre in Berlin. The close connection and artistic exchange between the Rhineland and the North American East and West Coasts become just as clear as the internationality of the art locations Cologne and Berlin, which is still formative for their self-image and perception today.
The exhibition, which was created in close collaboration with the artist, includes reference works by some of the artists portrayed, some of which belong to the permanent collection of Leopold-Hoesch-Museum. They pose questions about the significance of the photographic and the subject of the portrait for our relationship to the world and the pictorial approach to it. “Albrecht Fuchs. Album” is a collaboration between the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, the Kunsthaus im KunstKulturQuartier Nürnberg and the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren. A catalogue published by the Walther und Franz König bookshop has been released on the occasion of the exhibition.