Keep a stiff upper lip! Gundula Schulze Eldowy and Robert Frank

About

At the center of the exhibition is the encounter between an artist who comes from different worlds and who found an intensive dialogue through photography. Gundula Schulze Eldowy (born 1954) stood out in East Berlin for her complex social documentary photography as well as her unsparing and at the same time sensitive nude portraits. On the other side of the Iron Curtain is the Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank (1924–2019), who painted a sobering counter-image to the American Dream in his now legendary 1958 photo book The Americans . They met in East Berlin in 1985 and a lifelong friendship developed across the Wall and continents.

The show traces Gundula Schulze Eldowy's artistic path from East Berlin to New York, where she went for three years in 1990 at the invitation of Robert Frank. She got to know numerous artists from Robert Frank's environment: his wife, the painter June Leaf, the photographer Ted Croner, the photographer Ann Mandelbaum, the writer Allen Ginsberg and other representatives of the beatnik generation.

References to Robert Frank and the myth of New York can be seen in the over 200 photographs in the exhibition. Excerpts from the correspondence between Schulze Eldowy and Frank complement the show. The correspondence is designed as a diptych in an artistic video installation by filmmaker Helke Misselwitz and projected onto two screens.

The catalog is published by Spector Books (Leipzig). In addition to the works of Gundula Schulze Eldowy, primarily from the years 1990 to 1993, pictures by Robert Frank, Roger Melis and Helfried Strauß will be on view.

On March 2nd and 3rd, 2024, a retrospective with films by Robert Frank will complement the exhibition.

Funded by the Capital Culture Fund