Anne Schönharting has photographed people in their apartments in Berlin-Charlottenburg for over ten years. The images in her series HABITAT, whose title refers to a living space, are interiors, portraits, still lifes, stagings of the photographer and at the same time documentation: gestures, postures, objects and furnishings of the living spaces are an expression of the social status and personal self-image of those portrayed. The photographer, whose eye is trained on the Old Masters, entered into this very special cosmos with an open mind and with pleasure. At the same time, the idea of a bygone, upper-middle-class Charlottenburg seems to shimmer through her fine pictorial compositions.
Anne Schönharting's photographs now enter into a dialogue with the historic Charlottenburg Art Collection and its 19th-century works and the Berlin Secession at the Villa Oppenheim. Prosperity and the need for recognition had favored an urban collection policy at the beginning of the 20th century. The need to represent oneself in and with images can be seen in both pictorial worlds. Painting and photography share questions of representation: composition, light mood, and materiality are, today as a hundred years ago, carefully placed pictorial means. Fur and brushwork, curiosities and preciousness, figures and coloration - the dialogue between the paintings and the photographs opens up a multitude of references.
Opening: Wednesday, 08.02.23, 6:30 p.m.
Duration: 09.02. - 21.05.23.
More information here.