Peter Keetman. A Designed World. A Photographic Life's Work

Kunstfoyer Munich
May 31 to September 10, 2017

To mark the 100th anniversary of Peter Keetman's birth (1916–2005), this comprehensive retrospective offers the opportunity to rediscover the photographer's life's work. After its initial showing at the Museum Folkwang in Essen , "Peter Keetman: A World Shaped – A Photographic Life's Work" will travel to the House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and the Kunstfoyer of the Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung in Munich.

The exhibition not only traces Keetman's photographic career but also documents the multifaceted evolution of photography as a medium, encompassing both fine art and applied work. With approximately 360 exhibits, it presents Keetman in nine chapters as a young, rebellious figure within the influential "fotoform" group. However, it also showcases him as one of the most innovative and poetic photographers of the post-war era, whose extensive oeuvre seamlessly blended nature and movement studies, photographic experiments, industrial photography, and applied work.

Peter Keetman's work is today exemplary of post-war German photographic modernism. Its origin lies in the formless and fragmented world, in the legacy of National Socialism and the Second World War, from which Keetman returned as an invalid. Keetman's great originality and power lay in his desire to reshape this reality photographically in a new and constructive way, by bringing together two central currents of those years: on the one hand, the modernist will towards form, experimentation, and abstraction; on the other hand, the turning towards the world, towards reconstruction, and above all towards nature, down to its most elemental components.

Visually, Keetman's photographs explore formal elements of movement and structure. The reconstruction of Germany, the renewed mobilization, the economic miracle, and the new "Made in Germany" products are translated into abstract images, as exemplified by Keetman's famous 1953 series on the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg. The exhibition concludes with "Keetman's Garden," the Chiemgau landscape, which serves as a place of rest and inspiration for this extraordinary photographer.

"Designed World" is the first museum exhibition dedicated to Peter Keetman in 20 years, created in close collaboration between the F.C. Gundlach Foundation and the Museum Folkwang. The exhibition is based on the scholarly research of the estates held by both institutions. Curated by F.C. Gundlach, Sebastian Lux, Petra Steinhardt, and Florian Ebner.

A catalogue published by Steidl Verlag accompanies the exhibition:
Peter Keetman. Designed World

Publisher: F.C. Gundlach
Texts: Ludger Derenthal, Florian Ebner, Ute Eskildsen, F.C. Gundlach, Gottfried Jäger, Sebastian Lux and Petra Steinhardt
Design: Claas Möller
Price: €48 / ISBN 978-3-95829-204-8

Art Foyer
Maximilianstrasse 53, 80538 Munich
Information hotline: 089 / 2160 2244

Opening hours: daily 9:00-19:00
Closed on December 24th, 25th, and 31st.
(Admission free)