Faces. The Power of the Human Visage
© Nachlass Helmar Lerski, Museum Folkwang, Essen
12/02/2020 — 24/05/2021
Starting from Helmar Lerski’s outstanding photo series Metamorphose – Verwandlungen durch Licht (Metamorphosis through Light) (1935/36), the exhibition Faces presents portraits from the period of the Weimar Republic.
The 1920s and ’30s saw photographers radically renew the conventional understanding of the classic portrait: their aim was no longer to represent an individual’s personality; instead, they conceived of the face as material to be staged according to their own ideas. In this, the photographed face became a locus for dealing with avant-garde aesthetic ideas as well as interwar-period social developments. And it was thus that modernist experiments, the relationship between individual and general type, feminist roll-playing, and political ideologies collided in—and thereby expanded—the general understanding of portrait photography.
Albertina
Located in the historical heart of Vienna, the Albertina combines Imperial flair with great art. A magnificent former residence of the Habsburgs and an art museum of international renown, the Albertina stands for one of the most important collections of graphic art, attracting city and cultural tourists from all over the world.
