WALTER SCHELS 16° PISCES . RETROSPECTIVE

On the occasion of Walter Schels' 90th birthday, the F.C. Gundlach Foundation and C/O Berlin are presenting the photographer's first major retrospective in Berlin. With more than 300 works, it opens up new insights into a body of work spanning almost seven decades. We cordially invite you to the exhibition opening on June 19 at 8 PM at Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22-24, 10623 Berlin. Speakers include Stephan Erfurt, Chairman of the C/O Berlin Foundation, and curators Sophia Greiff (C/O Berlin), Sebastian Lux, and Franziska Mecklenburg (both F.C. Gundlach Foundation). The exhibition runs from June 20 to September 2.

The exhibition brings together key groups of works and focuses on a previously unknown side of this oeuvre: the extensive experimental work and transformative approaches that characterize Schels’ photographic practice – a discovery that changes the perception of the photographer. The selection of works is based on a review of several thousand prints from the photographer's archive, which will be preserved and made accessible by the F.C. Gundlach Foundation.

Since the late 1960s, Schels has moved between documentary and artistic photography. He became known primarily for his black-and-white portraits, whose characteristically reduced, highly condensed visual language he developed starting in the 1980s. In long-term studies and portrait series such as Blind, Living Again, or trans*, he addresses fundamental questions of human existence, dealing with presence and perception, with identity and existential transitions. Schels focuses on unadorned expression – from the faces of newborns to centenarians, from well-known personalities such as the Dalai Lama to unknown people, and from animals to plants. Against a neutral background, immediate encounters with a unique counterpart emerge.

The exhibition invites visitors to reinterpret these well-known portraits and series in conjunction with the other, parallel-created yet never-before-shown half of his work. An early starting point for Schels' two-track approach are the series created in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside street photography, close-ups of manhole covers transform the supposedly functional into an independent visual language. Views of skyscrapers condense in analog photomontages, double exposures, and overdrawings into surreal urban landscapes that explore the relationship between individual and city.

For Schels, a picture is never finished. Transformation appears both as a thematic motif and as an artistic method. With overpaintings, solarizations, and collages, he transcends the boundaries of photography into the painterly – extending to current abstract works in which he works directly with photographic chemicals and plant fragments, making the materiality of the photographic process itself the subject of the image. Wherever possible, the presentation relies on original handprints, including large-format sponge developments and prints that Schels has reworked over the years using various techniques.

The exhibition title 16° Pisces refers to Schels' birth constellation. At the time of his birth, the sun was in the zodiac sign Pisces at 16 degrees. For the artist, this is a poetic self-localization, which connects with qualities such as sensibility and intuition and reflects his interest in people and existential questions. Walter Schels understands his work as an open process.

The retrospective Walter Schels . 16° Pisces is an invitation to look further. Curated by Sophia Greiff (C/O Berlin), Beate Lakotta, Sebastian Lux, and Franziska Mecklenburg (F.C. Gundlach Foundation). An accompanying publication will be released by Steidl.