JOACHIM BROHM – VERNACULAR & MODERN

This London-based solo exhibition records an ongoing concern with the notion of architecture as an environment for recreation, in a new body of work that contrasts the modernism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Brohm’s study of vernacular German allotment buildings of the late 1970s, Typology.

Over 80 years ago, German-American architect Mies van der Rohe took part in a competition to design a club house for the newly founded Krefeld Golf Club, although due to the Great Depression, the house was never built. In 2013, Mies’ design was finally put into practice under the artistic directorship of Belgian architect Paul Robbrecht, using a model built according to the original plans.
Joachim Brohm spent time photographing this temporary model and created a body of work entitled Mies Model Study consisting of both colour and black and white images. Fascinated with the rough nature of some parts of the structure as a contemporary interpretation of the incomplete Mies sketches, Brohm’s images gracefully reference the aesthetic language of modernist architectural photography of the 20th century.
Typology 1979 is the retrospective title Brohm gave to a series of photographs taken while studying at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, using muted tones to document vernacular German allotment huts in muted tones and colours. The series is devoted to recreational places and the activities of people living in the artist’s immediate area around the industrial Ruhr.

Exhibition runs through to January 10th, 2015

Grimaldi Gavin
27 Albemarle Street
London
W1S 4DW

www.grimaldigavin.com

CONFLICT, TIME, PHOTOGAPHY

From the seconds after a bomb is detonated to a former scene of battle years after a war has ended, this moving exhibition focuses on the passing of time, tracing a diverse and poignant journey through over 150 years of conflict around the world, since the invention of photography.

In an innovative move, the works are ordered according to how long after the event they were created from moments, days and weeks to decades later. Photographs taken seven months after the fire bombing of Dresden are shown alongside those taken seven months after the end of the First Gulf War. Images made in Vietnam 25 years after the fall of Saigon are shown alongside those made in Nakasaki 25 years after the atomic bomb. The result is the chance to make never-before-made connections while viewing the legacy of war as artists and photographers have captured it in retrospect.

The immediate trauma of war can be seen in the eyes of Don McCullin’s Shell-shocked US Marine 1968, while the destruction of buildings and landscapes are documented by Simon Norfolk’s Afghanistan: Chronotopia 2001.
Different conflicts will also reappear from multiple points in time throughout the exhibition. The Second World War for example is addressed in Jerzy Lewczynski’s 1960 photographs of the Wolf’s Lair / Adolf Hitler’s War Headquarters, Shomei Tomatsu’s images of objects found in Nagasaki, Kikuji Kawada’s epic project The Map made in Hiroshima in the 1960s, Michael Schmidt’s Berlin streetscapes from 1980 and Nick Waplington’s 1993 close-ups of cell walls from a Prisoner of War camp in Wales.

Opposite – Richard Peter, Dresden After Allied Raids Germany 1945

Exhibition runs through to March 15th, 2015

Tate Modern
Bankside
London
SE1 9TG

www.howardgreenberg.com