Christer Strömholm

Kicken Berlin opens the 2013 exhibition season with a presentation of works by Man Ray and Christer Strömholm. Swede Christer Strömholm stands for the midcentury abstraction in the European movement of subjective photography. He is one of the most important Swedish photographers of the 20th century. In the early 1950s – under the name Christer Christian – he joined the German group fotoform, which had formed around Peter Keetman, Toni Schneiders, Otto Steinert and others in 1948. The members were united by their rejection of the conventional concept of photography. The loner Strömholm soon went his own way again, but his entire oeuvre reflects the fundamentals of the subjective perspective and experimental visual language formed by his association with the group. Paris was long home to Strömholm and launch site of his numerous trips into the world.His central themes are the world as a realm of symbols, obscure likenesses, the fringes of society such as prostitution, travesty, and the draw of death. A melancholy, mood – its roots in the existentialism of the postwar era – pervades his street scenes, portraits, and landscapes. Traces of transience permeate his images; Strömholm captures these symbols of a dark world in his strict visual language above and beyond its naturalistic appearance and seeks the limits and possible extensions of the photographic medium. Strong contrasts, deep black and clear graphic structures define his images. Kicken Berlin presents primarily Strömholm’s abstract works. They show graffiti in multiple variations as traces of colors or clefts, lines of light or shadow, as well as the organic linear forms of plants and trees.