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Peter Keetman. Shaping the World


Kunstfoyer Munich


31 May to 10 September 2017


On the occasion of the 100th birthday of Peter Keetman (1916 - 2005), the extensive retrospective offers the opportunity to rediscover the photographer's life's work. After its first venue at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Peter Keetman. Shaping the World in the House of Photography in the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg and in the Kunstfoyer of the Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung, Munich.

The exhibition not only traces Keetman's photographic career, but also documents the multifaceted career of the medium of photography between free artistic creation and applied work.

With around 360 exhibits, the nine chapters of the exhibition present Keetman as a young savage of the style-forming group fotoform. But she also shows him as one of the most innovative and poetic photographers of the post-war period, who combined nature and motion studies, photographic experiments, industrial photography and applied work in his comprehensive oeuvre.

Peter Keetman’s biography and his photographic language are closely tied to German History from the 1930s to the 1960s, from the suppression of avant-garde photography in the Nazi era through World War II to postwar disillusion and the economic miracle.
 The exhibition includes a substantial selection of Keetman’s early works in the style of New Objectivity as well as his photographs taken during the war against the Soviet Union, in which Keetman looses his left leg.

In the late 1940s, Peter Keetman leaves the aesthetic dogmatism of his teachers behind and joins the secessionist group ‘fotoform’. Inspired by the experimental approach of avant-garde photography in the 1920s the group developed a new photographic language, based upon formal reduction, upon the creative power of light and upon the subjectivity of individual experience. Together with Otto Steinert and the other members of ‘fotoform’, Keetman marks a new beginning in photography.

The retrospective shows the fascinating development of German photography starting in the late 1940s. It also illustrates how Keetman avoids the paralyzing danger of formalism by working in several fields of photography – documenting the reconstruction of Munich, discovering the hidden structures of landscape and nature and the big picture in the smallest detail, translating the dynamics of a changing society in abstract images.

This retrospective show is the result of a close cooperation between the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, holding a substantial part of Keetman’s archive as well as his copyrights, and the Museum Folkwang, holding his negative archive and a large number of his work prints.

An exhibition of the Museum Folkwang and the F.C. Gundlach Foundation

Senior Curator: F.C. Gundlach
Curators: Sebastian Lux, Petra Steinhardt, Florian Ebner

The Catalogue

A comprehensive book covering life and work of Peter Keetman accompanies the exhibition. German edition published by Steidl in June 2016.

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

Kunstfoyer
Maximilianstraße 53, 80538 München