METAMORPHOSIS: Heinz Hajek-Halke´s Photomontages & New Image-Makers

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

Opening: Friday, 28 February 2025, 7 – 9 pm.

Duration: 01/03 - 03/05/2025, Wednesday – Saturday, 1 ­­­– 6 pm.

Special opening hours during EMOP-Opening Days: Sunday, 2 March, 1 – 6 pm.

Exhibited artists: Matthieu Bourel, Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, Heinz Hajek-Halke, Mayumi Hosokura, Noé Sendas, Eva Stenram, Miriam Tölke, K YOUNG.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Heinz Hajek-Halke's first photomontages, the group exhibition “Metamorphosis”celebrates the Berlin artist's early work (1925 - 1935), rediscovers it and brings it together with works from a range of contemporary photomontage and collage artists.

Heinz Hajek-Halke (1898 - 1983) is an important photographic artist of the 20th century. While he explored the boundaries of the photographic medium in a completely new way in his abstract, camera-less works of the 1950s and 1960s, his photographic experiments coincided with the beginning of his career.

In 1924, a few years after completing his art and graphics studies in Berlin, he taught himself photography. From this point onwards, he worked as a press photographer for various agencies and was especially enthusiastic about experimental work in the darkroom. Between 1925 and 1931, he specialised in photomontage. Inspired by the aesthetics and special effects of silent film, Hajek-Halke set out in search of new visual forms and, during this period of intensive experimentation, explored complex techniques such as capturing a sequence of movements on a plate, the multiple exposure of several negatives in the enlarger or in the camera as well as the photo collage. By combining images from different contexts, he succeeded in creating dynamic compositions with a new meaning that drew on the montages of the surrealist avant-garde.

His iconic photomontages, which he designed freely or published in the illustrated press and as part of adverts, date from this period. A selection of vintage prints from the years 1925 to 1935, famous and rare works from the Heinz Hajek-Halke Collection, can be discovered in the exhibition. These unreal images, which were particularly attractive to magazines because they were original and entertaining, made Hajek-Halke one of the most sought-after “special effects photographers” in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. His two favourite motifs, the portrait and the female nude, form the basis for surprising experiments: whole faces and cropped bodies lose their identity when they are superimposed with various motifs such as street scenes, dilapidated house facades, cabaret scenes or graphic patterns. The metamorphosis works marvellously through this play with dreamlike associations. In his nude montages, which were his speciality between 1930 and 1932, Hajek-Halke surpassed himself and invented new techniques such as the mirror effect in the Black-and-white Nude, an image that went down in the annals of photography shortly before the Third Reich interrupted his artistic career.

The photomontages from this period, many of which were published during his lifetime, inspired later generations of artists. Invented in the 19th century, this technique has continued to permeate art and popular culture from the historical avant-gardes of the last century to advertising. With the proliferation of online images and digital hybridisation tools, montage has remained a sign of our times. The composite image and its diverse techniques of photographic manipulation - photocollage, superimposition, digital montage and retouching, automatic image generation using AI - are at the centre of contemporary artistic practice. The exhibition “Metamorphosis”, consisting of two different parts, offers a rediscovery of Hajek-Halke's early work and examines the connections between his photomontages of portraits and female nudes with contemporary art.

The exhibited works vary between collages of magazine images and vintage photos (Matthieu Bourel, Miriam Tölke and K YOUNG), digital montages (Mayumi Hosokura, Eva Stenram) and photomontages consisting of mixed media (Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf and Noé Sendas). The appropriation of external image sources is a practice common to almost all of these artists: partially erased or covered by other elements, multiplied, fragmented or distorted, the faces and bodies of the original images are manipulated and given a new interpretation. Poetic assemblages, the exploration of questions of identity, gender and social conventions or the questioning of our own views and perceptions - the metamorphosis of the images never ceases to enchant and challenge us.

An exhibition organised as part of the EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography 2025.

Preisinformation:

Eintritt frei / Admission free.