BEGEGNUNGEN UND ZUFÄLLE | Benjamin Katz

In the organizer's words:

Benjamin Katz has accompanied many of his fellow artists since the 1970s, including Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter. He has documented countless vernissages, art events and encounters with contemporary artists and created portraits of big names such as Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman. His archive is probably the most comprehensive collection of contemporary artist portraits. This is the well-known side of the chronicler Benjamin Katz - the portraits of visual artists made him famous.

Benjamin Katz has always photographed other things as well: Humorous details, reduced architectural shots and whimsical still lifes. Benjamin Katz does nothing different in these photographs than in his portraits. He is a patient observer and grateful collector. He is aware of the quality of individual moods and facets, which are later able to tell their entire story in the picture. Looking back, his documentary details are at least as important to the photographer himself as the much-publicized portraits. And in recent years, he has focused on a new group of motifs: floral still lifes. He documents a sequence of changing flower arrangements on the stove at home in a completely unagitated manner.

The exhibition at the Leica Gallery Stuttgart unites the different facets of Benjamin Katz and deliberately shows some previously unseen photographs from the archive. Benjamin Katz himself shows the transformation of his photographic archive and artistic oeuvre by means of changing reading directions and perspectives.