Rooms / Stages

Following the extensive Body Performance exhibition, featuring an international selection of artists that was shown at the Helmut Newton Foundation in 2019, a related exhibition, Rooms / Stages, is now on view.

Following the extensive Body Performance exhibition, featuring an international selection of artists that was shown at the Helmut Newton Foundation in 2019, a related exhibition, Rooms / Stages , is now on view. This presentation, however, shifts the context and focus from the performative act to the stage itself. “Location scouts” are generally sent ahead to find suitable sites and locations for specific movie scenes. Nevertheless, once a film is completed, the viewer’s main focus is ultimately less on the settings and more on the actors, their portrayals of their roles, and the complexity of the plotline. It is only when we are particularly fond of or engaged by a film and rewatch it that we spend more time becoming truly aware of other details, such as lighting, sound, costumes, and production design. The same can be said of theatre. In photography, we seldom recognise a space as a pictorial motif unless the photographer declares it to be a main feature. The artists in the current group exhibition are each introduced by a single group of works that represents their oeuvre. They consciously integrate the space into their staged portraits or dance images, using long-exposure photography to allow dancers or those portrayed to vanish from the images again; or they focus on deserted interiors, for instance on their own studios or residences with changing, moved furniture, or on museums such as Versailles or Dresden, within which we can inevitably and completely subjectively imagine a specific event. Alongside framed photographs, large-scale murals are used to define some of the exhibition spaces. On view are elaborate spatial interventions, some created for a single photograph. These feature inhospitable yet perfectly designed subway corridors in Berlin and London, as well as dance and theatre scenes. Helmut Newton, whose work is continually recontextualised through temporary exhibitions at his Foundation in Berlin, transformed the most diverse locations into stage settings, as can be seen in the second section of the exhibition. These sites include luxurious hotel rooms and lobbies in Paris, Milan and New York depicted in his fashion photographs from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, or – as if in a complete U-turn – austere, rugged outdoor settings in Monte Carlo or even his garage there, where he created striking contrasts to the most exclusive fashion designs in the 1990s, always in keeping with the spirit of the times. Helmut Newton worked much like a film director and set designer, adopting this dual role on the stages he created. Newton’s fashion-based interiors and some of his stage photography are included as examples in the current exhibition: for instance, magazine photos commissioned by The New Yorker , taken in 1983 in Pina Bausch’s studio in Wuppertal, or those he took starting in the mid-1980s for the programmes of the Monte Carlo Ballet. We encounter all of these motifs in the form of colossal murals, a selection of framed lifetime prints , and an abundance of Polaroids displayed in the surrounding vitrines. A special exhibition of the Helmut Newton Foundation at the Museum für Fotografie

What to expect:
Mixed media, Installation, Multi-disciplinary