The exhibition “BARBARA KLEMM. LIGHT AND DARK. PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GERMANY” celebrates the talent of one of Germany’s most important women photographers, Barbara Klemm.
Organized on the occasion of the celebration of the “30th anniversary of the German-Romanian Friendship Treaty”, the personal exhibition of the artist Barbara Klemm brings together about 150 black and white images that capture people in their daily lives, political, business, or art personalities and exceptional historical moments.
Barbara Klemm photographed key events in history that reveals an image of Germany, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also a fragment of Romania’s history with a series of remarkable photographs taken by the artist in her travels through Romania fifty years ago (the ’70s and ’90s).
The exhibition also includes a gallery of portraits featuring political figures, businessmen, and artists such as Madonna, Claudia Schiffer, Andy Warhol, Karl Lagerfeld, Angela Merkel, Leonid Brezhnev, and Erich Honecker.
Born in 1939, Barbara Klemm is well known for her work at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s most influential newspapers, where she worked for over 45 years. Throughout her career, she has received important awards such as the Fellowship of the Academy of Arts, Berlin, Pour le Mérite, and in 2012 she received the Leica Hall of Fame Award, an award given to outstanding photographers.
In her art, Barbara Klemm combines a documentary approach with a painstaking artistic composition made in black and white. The choice of non-colors is inspired by her way of dreaming, which the artist said only happens in black and white, an approach that puts even more emphasis on the characters presented in the images.
The exhibition is curated by Matthias Flügge, German art historian, curator, and vice-president of the Akademie der Künste and vice-chancellor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. A key figure in the German art world, Matthias Flügge also worked as a freelance journalist and exhibition organizer and has been a member of numerous commissions and councils (including the Kunstfonds Bonn jury, the federal purchasing commission, and the jury of hauptstadtkulturfonds).
Curator Matthias Flügge divided the exhibition into two parts: one focused on the artist’s general works, taken mainly in Germany, and the other on her travels to Romania, taken during the communist period and after the fall of the regime. This division builds parallels between the two countries that share a strong common history that has shaped today’s society in both places.
The exhibition, open to the public until August 7, was organized by the German Embassy in Bucharest in collaboration with the Institute for External Relations and Art Safari, with the support of the Goethe-Institut and the Romanian Cultural Institute.
Tickets can be purchased here.
