WOLS (1913-1951) - Ohne Titel

WOLS (1913-1951), Untitled, 1930/1998.

Silver gelatin, 25.8 x 18.4 cm on 38 x 29 cm, verso marked: "Nachlaß WOLS; einmalige Auflage für die griffelkunst 1998".

Condition: Good. Illustrations are part of the condition description.

About
Wols (1913–1951), actually Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, was a German-French photographer, painter and graphic artist, and is among the most significant artists of European modernism. Even before he became known as a pioneer of Informel and Tachisme, Wols began his artistic career as a photographer. After gaining initial experience in the studio of Dresden photographer Genja Jonas, he went to Paris in 1932 on the recommendation of László Moholy-Nagy, where he came into contact with the Surrealist avant-garde.

In the 1930s Wols worked in Paris successfully as a portrait and art photographer. In 1937 he received a major commission to document the Paris World’s Fair photographically and showed his photographs for the first time at the Galerie de la Pléiade. His images differ clearly from the conventional portrait and documentary photography of their time: unusual framings, extreme close-ups, light and shadow, and the focus on textures and inconspicuous details give his pictures a subjective, at times surrealist, effect.

Wols’s photography occupies an important position between Bauhaus, Surrealism, and photographic avant-garde. At the same time, one can already detect in his experimental photographs that turn toward structure, abstraction, and immediate perception that later would characterize his painting and would make Wols one of the most important pioneers of European Informel.